Flouri, Eirini, & Midouhas, Emily
Researchers: Eirini FlouriEmily Midouhas
University Affiliation: University College London
Email: e.flouri@iooe.ac.uk
Research Question:
1. To model the relationship between family poverty across early-to-middle childhood (ages 9 months to 7 years), in terms of both the duration of exposure and its timing, and child behavior (measured as internalizing and externalizing problems and prosocial behavior at age 7).
2. To explore the role of school composition—academic and socio-economic—in both predicting child behavior and moderating the effects of poverty on child behavior.
3. To examine gender differences in the moderated (by school composition) effect of poverty on child behavior.
Published: Yes
Journal Name or Institutional Affiliation: Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology
Journal Entry: DOI # 10.1007/s00127-016-1206-7
Year: 2016
Findings:
- The effects of poverty were strong and robust to adjustment for child and parent background characteristics, as well as school intake characteristics.
- Neither the academic nor the socio-economic composition of the school moderated the effect of family poverty on children’s behavior in primary school. However, children attending schools with more disadvantaged socio-economic intakes had more internalizing and externalizing problems than their counterparts.
- The cumulative effect of family poverty was significantly related to all three outcomes, and was robust to family and child controls and the MCS design variables.
- The effects of chronic poverty and intermittent poverty relative to never being poor were significant on all three outcomes.
- School Key Stage 1 scores did not interact with the number of sweeps in poverty to affect any child outcomes.
- When measuring poverty in terms of timing, poverty at any age was associated with more externalizing and internalizing problems and less prosocial behavior.
- Relative to white children, Indian, black, Pakistani/Bangladeshi and ‘other ethnic’ children had fewer externalizing problems. Black and ‘other ethnic’ children had higher prosocial behavior scores than white children. General intelligence was related to all three outcomes.
- Cumulative poverty was related to an increase in internalizing and externalizing problems, and a decrease in prosocial behavior. Chronic or intermittent poverty was related to an increase in externalizing and internalizing problems and to a decrease in prosocial behavior. Poverty experienced at any of the three ages (9 months, 3 or 5 years) was associated with an increase in
externalizing and internalizing problems.