Predictors of Achievement from Early Childhood to Adulthood

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 DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): This project will significantly contribute to the growing body of research on physical attractiveness as a source of social stratification that has wide implications for health, akin to more frequently studied factors like race and gender. Health is an integral component of the approach to this project-as a dimension of physical attractiveness (e.g., weight), as a mechanism by which physical attractiveness has effects on social and academic achievement (e.g., mental health), and because the adult socioeconomic attainment that is expected to reflect histories of physical attractiveness is a fundamental component of lifelong health and health disparities. This project also will provide a practical service to the feld by expanding a public use data set so that it can be used to study the role of attractiveness in a wide variety of outcomes, including health behaviors and health disparities. Specifically, the project will create the most comprehensive longitudinal data ever amassed of physical attractiveness from infancy through adolescence by re-coding videotapes that were already gathered at nearly a dozen time points in the NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development. It will describe trajectories of beauty in this cohort and test important hypotheses derived from an integrative theoretical model put forward in a new book by the investigators. Based on status characteristics and life course theory as well as developmental systems and stigma perspectives, beauty's association with higher achievement is expected to operate through mental health mechanisms, including positive mood, perceived competence, and self esteem. These mental health resources are expected to counteract some of the ways being good looking could distract from schooling (i.e., physical assets might accentuate desires to climb the social ladder as young people move into and through adolescence and its associated peer contexts). Differences in the strength of associations by social location (gender, race/ethnicity, SES), by developmental period (early childhood, elementary, junior, and high school), and by ecological contexts (schools) will also be examined. The results of this project, and the new source of public use data created through the project, will stimulate future developmental, social psychological, and public health research on physical attractiveness as a stratifying force. These results will be written up for academic journal articles and also widely disseminated, which is important given the public, media and policy interest in the topic.