THE NICHD STUDY OF EARLY CHILD CARE--PHASE III

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DESCRIPTION: (Adapted from applicant's description) The goal of Phase III of the NICHD Study of Early Child Care is to extend a collaborative, prospective, longitudinal study of a cohort of 1103 children and their families, first enrolled at one month of age and studied intensively through first grade (age 7) in Phases I and II of this cooperative agreement. These participants will be studied through middle childhood (fifth grade) in order to investigate how important contexts contribute to trajectories of development from birth through middle childhood within the broader social ecology of work and family. The design of Phase III involves intensive study of the children and their parents at third and fifth grades (home visits, school observations, and laboratory assessments) as well as regularly scheduled (at least one per year) phone-call interviews with the children and mothers. In addition, questionnaires will be gathered from teachers in second through fifth grades. Structural and process features of key contexts (home/family, school, out-of- school settings, neighborhood/community, parents' work, and socioeconomic/cultural niches) will be examined in relation to trajectories in three principal domains of child development (achievement/cognition, social/emotional, and health), as well as the domain of parental well-being. Through multivariate modeling of longitudinal relations among features of multiple contexts and developmental trajectories, work in Phase III will be organized by four central research issues: a) the interplay between early and concurrent experience in varied contexts and developmental trajectories from birth through middle childhood; b) the extent to which different processes account for development trajectories across children and/or families that differ with regard to cultural, social, or economic niche; c) the ways in which experiences in familial and extrafamilial contexts contribute to risk and resilience; and d) the relations between parents' work and family life and the consequences of work-family relations for parents' well-being and that of their children.