Economic Stress & Child Development Across 3 Generations

本申请寻求5年的支持，以调查家庭经济压力在幼儿发展中的作用。拟议的项目将扩展以前对500多名早期青少年的研究，该研究始于1989年，至今仍在继续。再提供5年的资金，将有可能审查12至32岁群组成员的生活轨迹。研究的参与者在经济萧条时期在中西部的农村长大。该项目的早期阶段研究了这些艰苦经历如何影响队列成员（G2）及其父母（G1）的生活。研究的下一阶段将把调查范围扩大到家庭成员中最大的孩子（G3）。 原始队列。关于青春期和成年早期G2代的丰富信息档案（例如，关于个性、精神障碍、教育和工作、信仰、价值观和认知能力的多信息人报告）提供了一个独特的机会，以评估个人特征和经济环境对儿童发展的综合影响。具体而言，本研究将探讨：（1）G2父母的个人特征如何影响G1和G2代之间经济困难的连续性（代际假设），（2）家庭压力过程的联系程度 G2经济困难与G3发展之间的关系（家庭压力假说），（3）父母对孩子的投资是否将G2经济困难与G3发展联系起来（父母投资假说），以及（4）早期G2特征是否可以解释G2困难和儿童发展，从而消除经济压力与儿童发展之间的联系（欺骗假说）。研究结果将提供重要的新资料，说明经济困难可能对健康和发展造成的后果的脆弱性和复原力。由于这项研究的长期、多代、前瞻性设计，而且由于使用了广泛的多信息提供者措施， 描述的发展G2和估计250 G3儿童在调查中，这项研究是独特的定位，以评估几个竞争的假设，经济压力和儿童的生活，没有得到充分解决，在以前的研究。

This application seeks 5 years of support to investigate the role of family economic stress in the development of young children. The proposed project will extend previous research on a cohort of over 500 early adolescents that began in 1989 and continues today. Funding for 5 more years will make it possible to examine the life trajectories of cohort members from 12 to 32 years of age. The participants in the study grew up during a time of economic depression in the rural Midwest. Earlier phases of the project have examined how those hardship experiences influenced the lives of cohort members (G2) and their parents (G1). The next phase of the research will extend the investigation to the oldest child (G3) of members of the original cohort. The rich archive of information on the G2 generation during adolescence and early adulthood (e.g., multi-informant reports on personality, psychiatric disorders, education and work, beliefs, values, and cognitive abilities) provides a unique opportunity to evaluate the combined influence of personal characteristics and economic circumstances on child development. Specifically, the study will examine: (1) how personal characteristics of G2 parents influence continuity in economic hardship between the G1 and G2 generations (the intergenerational hypothesis), (2) the degree to which family stress processes connect G2 economic hardship to G3 development (the family stress hypothesis), (3) whether parental investments in children link G2 economic hardship to G3 development (the parental investments hypothesis), and (4) whether earlier G2 characteristics explain both G2 hardship and child development, thus eliminating the connection between economic stress and child development (the spuriousness hypothesis). Results of the study will provide important new information regarding vulnerability and resilience to the possible health and developmental consequences of economic hardship. Because of the long-term, multi-generational, prospective design of the study, and because of the broad spectrum of multi-informant measures used to describe the development of G2 and the estimated 250 G3 children in the investigation, this research is uniquely positioned to evaluate several competing hypotheses regarding economic stress and children's lives that have not been adequately addressed in previous studies.