Can family socioeconomic resources account for racial and ethnic test score gaps?
An article proposing that discrepancies among children's school readiness test scores may be more attributable to family socioeconomic resources than race or ethnicity
Reports & Papers
Child care
An analysis of the frequency of use of various child care arrangements by families, based on data from the 1968-1972 Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID)
Reports & Papers
Child Care and Community Services: Characteristics of Service Use and Effects on Parenting
The study aims to improve the field's understanding of the features of child care services that are most critical to support children's development and identify family-level processes that might be influenced by child care. Specific research questions are: (1) What characteristics of parents predict usage of supports and services offered through the child care center and the community?; (2) What types of services and supports do parents use?; (3) Do the services and supports provided or referred to parents from the child care or preschool setting positively affect the home environment and parenting practices? To address these questions three national data sets (Head Start Impact Study, National Evaluation of Early Head Start, and National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development) are being analyzed. The results of the study can further inform the field of the parental characteristics related to service take-up and whether the services have a positive effect on the home, in addition to providing practitioners and policymakers with evidence to design early child care and education programs that improve the environments and relationships vital for children's academic and social development.
Administration for Children and Families/OPRE Projects
Child Care during the First Year of School: How Extent, Type, and Quality Relate to Child Well-Being
A systematic examination of the links between extent, type, and quality of child care and children's social-emotional and cognitive well-being, using the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-kindergarten cohort (ECLS-K). The sample for this study includes approximately 14,000 kindergarteners in the ECLS-K. The research explores the full range of child care options (formal and informal), focusing on sub-groups of children including low-income and subsidy-eligible. This study informs Child Care and Development Fund (CCDF) policy regarding school-age child care, including how to design subsidy programs and cost effective quality enhancement strategies that best support school-age child well-being.
Administration for Children and Families/OPRE Projects
The child care mode choice of working mothers
An examination of the relationship between a family’s socioeconomic status and their use of formal child care, using data from the 1974 wave of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics
Reports & Papers
Can intensive early childhood intervention programs eliminate income-based cognitive and achievement gaps?
An estimation of the relationship of participation in a comprehensive early childhood development intervention to income-based differences in child cognitive development and school readiness, based on secondary analyses of data from the nationally representative Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Birth Cohort, and from the impact evaluation of the Infant Health and Development Program, a comprehensive intervention for low-birth-weight premature infants
Reports & Papers
Can intensive early childhood intervention programs eliminate income-based cognitive and achievement gaps?
An estimation of the relationship of participation in a comprehensive early childhood development intervention to income-based differences in child cognitive development and school readiness, based on secondary analyses of data from the nationally representative Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Birth Cohort, and from the impact evaluation of the Infant Health and Development Program, a comprehensive intervention for low-birth-weight premature infants
Reports & Papers
Connecting child care quality to child outcomes: Drawing policy lessons from nonexperimental data
An examination of biases found in data from longitudinal studies, including the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Study of Early Child Care and a discussion of how to control biases stemming from analyses of parental selection of child care
Reports & Papers
Does maternal employment mandated by welfare reform affect children's behavior?
A longitudinal study investigating associations between children's behavior and characteristics of their mothers' employment (i.e., duration of employment, transitions from non-work to work, and extent of work participation)
Reports & Papers
Economic deprivation and early childhood development
A study of the impact of poverty and poverty correlates such as ethnicity, maternal education, neighborhood conditions and single parenthood on child cognitive and behavioral development, using longitudinal data from the Infant Health and Development program
Reports & Papers
The economic environment of childhood
A summary of the economic environment of childhood with special emphasis on trends in the average level of family economic resources available to poverty children
Other
Educational attainment
A longitudinal study of the relationship of parental characteristics, children characteristics, and environmental factors on children’s educational attainment, focusing on the characteristics and factors of parental income, cognitive skills, and education level, children’s cognitive skills and achievement motivation, local labor market conditions, and the quality of schooling
Reports & Papers
The effects of poverty on children
A review of longitudinal studies on the relationship between family income and children?s developmental outcomes, emphasizing the influence of the timing, depth, and duration of poverty, and other family characteristics
Other
Effects of welfare and employment policies on young children: New findings on policy experiments conducted in the early 1990s
A policy report analyzing previous research on how preschool children's development is affected by welfare policies, particularly those that increase parental employment and income
Other
Five thousand American families: Patterns of economic progress: Vol. I. An analysis of the first five years of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics
An analysis of the factors affecting families’ well-being, economic opportunity and educational attainment, based on data gathered from the 1968-1972 Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID)
Reports & Papers
For better and for worse: Welfare reform and the well-being of children and families
An examination of the evidence and evaluation of whether welfare reform has met one of its chief goals--improving the well-being of the nation's poor children
Other
Higher ground: New Hope for the working poor and their children
An evaluation of the short- and long-term effects of the New Hope program on the outcomes of the low-income participants and their children
Reports & Papers
How different are welfare and working families? And do these differences matter for children's achievement?
A nationally representative, longitudinal study comparing welfare-receiving families to working families to determine if the differences have an impact on children's well-being
Reports & Papers
How different are welfare and working families?: And do those differences matter for children's achievement? [Preliminary conference draft]
A comparison between families receiving Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) and middle class and low-socioeconomic working families in regard to mental health, time organization, household management, and financial expenditures, based on two longitudinal surveys, the National Survey of Families and Households and the Panel Study of Income Dynamics
Reports & Papers
How do state policymakers think about family processes and child development in low-income families?
An overview of the collaboration between state welfare officials and several federal governmental bodies to analyze the implications of welfare reform on children
Other
The importance of kindergarten-entry academic skills
A discussion of the differences in later school success of children who attend preschools that focus primarily on academics or on that include significant behavioral, emotional, and social skills components
Other
The incentives of government programs and the well-being of families
An examination of the material conditions of single mothers and their families before and soon after welfare reform in order to assess the net effect of policy changes on the well-being of families, using data from the Consumer Expenditure Survey and the Panel Study of Income Dynamics
Other
Kindergarten skills and fifth-grade achievement: Evidence from the ECLS-K
A study of the relationship between fifth grade math or reading achievement and children's academic skills, attention-related skills and socioemotional skills in kindergarten, based on a secondary analysis of a nationally representative longitudinal study of children beginning in kindergarten through fifth grade
Reports & Papers
Lessons from New Hope: The impact on children's well-being of a work-based antipoverty program for parents
A longitudinal, randomized study evaluating New Hope's (an employment-based antipoverty program) effects on children's well being and an investigation of why the effects occurred
Reports & Papers
Modal choice in child care arrangements
An inquiry into the influence of child care arrangement preferences on the labor participation decisions of women and families, based on information from the 1973 Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID)
Reports & Papers
