Race/Ethnicity, Poverty, and Connection Between Child Health and Early Education

描述（由申请人提供）：该项目调查的程度较高的健康问题之间的种族/少数民族儿童的所有经济阶层和贫困儿童之间的所有种族/民族人口在小学开始之前把他们在学术上处于不利地位，一旦小学已经开始。由于健康是一个政策服从发展因素和过渡到小学是一个关键的干预点，在教育生涯中，这样的研究提供了杠杆，试图解决长期存在的，重叠的种族/族裔和经济差距，在教育程度的早期生命过程中，预测社会流动性，发病率和死亡率在成年期增加不平等。借鉴一种经典的理论观点，即围绕向小学过渡的发展进程是教育程度方面人口差距的根本，该项目提出并测试了一个概念模型，该模型假定非洲裔美国人和拉丁美洲人/a儿童的身心健康状况较差，在学龄前阶段，经济上处于不利地位的儿童（以经济地位为准）和经济上处于不利地位的儿童（以种族/族裔为准）的入学率较低。重要的是，该项目还将探讨早期健康问题的学术风险的机制，并确定家庭组织，学前教育计划，小学教室和家庭学校合作伙伴关系的各个方面，以防止这些学术风险，特别是在传统上处于不利地位的人群中。一个由人口科学家组成的团队将与来自医学、发展心理学和社会工作的高级顾问合作进行这项研究。具体来说，该团队将应用多水平，增长曲线和倾向评分技术到两个NIH资助的数据集脆弱家庭和儿童福祉研究，其中过度抽样美国家庭社会经济谱的弱势一面，以及NICHD早期儿童保育和青年发展研究，该方法对更多的学生进行过度抽样，然后用从教师和家长那里收集的定性数据分析来补充定量调查，收入，种族多元化的小学。这个跨学科的、有理论基础的、混合方法的调查是专门设计来阐明儿童健康在种族/族裔和经济分层重叠系统的复制中的作用，从而直接为社会政策提供信息。儿童早期的健康问题和学术斗争之间的联系对美国社会种族/民族和经济分层的贡献。其主要目标是确定人口不平等以影响人口发病率和死亡率的方式代代相传的方式，然后确定对这一进程可能采取的政策上可行的补救措施。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): This project investigates the degree to which higher rates of health problems among race/ethnic minority children of all economic strata and among poor children from all race/ethnic populations prior to the start of elementary school put them at an academic disadvantage once elementary school has begun. Because health is a policy amenable developmental factor and the transition to elementary school is a critical intervention point in the educational career, such research provides leverage in attempts to address the persistent, overlapping race/ethnic and economic gaps in educational attainment in the early life course that forecast increasing inequalities in social mobility, morbidity, and mortality in adulthood. Drawing on a classic theoretical perspective that targets the development processes surrounding the transition into elementary school as fundamental to demographic disparities in educational attainment, this project puts forward and tests a conceptual model positing that the poorer physical and mental health of African-American and Latino/a children (controlling for economic status) and of economically disadvantaged children (controlling for race/ethnicity) in the pre-school years contribute to their lower rates of academic achievement in school. Importantly, this project will also explore the mechanisms underlying the academic risks of early health problems and identify aspects of family organization, pre-school programs, elementary school classrooms, and home-school partnerships that protect against these academic risks in general and in traditionally disadvantaged populations in particular. A team of population scientists working with senior consultants from medicine, developmental psychology, and social work will conduct this research. Specifically, this team will apply multi-level, growth curve, and propensity score techniques to two NIH-funded data sets the Fragile Families and Child Well-Being Study, which oversamples the disadvantaged side of the socioeconomic spectrum of American families, and the NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development, which oversamples the more advantaged side and then supplement this quantitative investigation with analysis of qualitative data to be collected from teachers and parents in a low-income, racially diverse elementary school. This interdisciplinary, theoretically grounded, mixed-methods investigation is specifically designed to elucidate the role of child health in the reproduction of overlapping systems of race/ethnic and economic stratification in ways that directly inform social policy.This project delves into a timely and significant public health issue: the contribution of the connection between health problems and academic struggles in early childhood to the race/ethnic and economic stratification of American society. The main goals are to determine a means by which demographic inequalities are transmitted across generations in ways that affect population rates of morbidity and mortality and then to identify potential policy-amenable remedies to this process.