SOCIOECONOMIC RISK AND RESILIENCE FACTORS FOR CHILDREN’S EARLY COGNITIVE AND SOCIOEMOTIONAL DEVELOPMENT

Abstract

Children’s early cognitive and socioemotional (SE) skills constitute their levels of school readiness, a key topic for research and policy due to their relation to children’s long-term academic and career success as well as mental health. This dissertation comprises three empirical studies that investigate socioeconomic risk and resilience processes relating to early cognitive and SE skills among racially, ethnically, and socioeconomically diverse preschoolers and kindergarteners. Paper 1 examines whether parenting relationships acted as a protective moderator reducing the effects of low socioeconomic status (SES) and household chaos on children's executive functioning (EF) and SE skills. This pre-registered study used data from 83 families with a preschooler or kindergartener. SES was associated with children’s EF skills measured by lab-based tasks, but not parent survey-based measures of EF or SE skills. Household chaos was related to children’s SE skills, but not EF. We found evidence of moderation, but not in the expected direction. Thus, this study failed to find evidence of parenting relationships as protective against risk from SES and household chaos for children’s EF and SE skills. However, parenting relationships were more strongly related to children’s survey EF and SE skills than either risk factor, indicating the importance of parenting relationships for children’s development across risk levels. Paper 2 is a pre-registered study using kindergarten data from the nationally representative Early Childhood Longitudinal Studies-Kindergarten: 2011 cohort (ECLS-K:2011) dataset to examine profiles of school readiness resilience amidst socioeconomic risk. We ascertained profiles of resilience in math, reading, and SE skills among kindergarteners exposed to socioeconomic risk, and examined whether contextual factors varied across profiles. Resilience was common among the five profiles identified. Two exhibited mostly resilience (Strong and Strong at School/Average Home SE), with average outcomes at or above the national means, while two profiles exhibited more vulnerability (Strong Math/Vulnerable Reading & SE and Vulnerable), with average outcomes mostly below the national means. Children in the Strong profile had the most socioeconomic resources across five measures, while children in the Vulnerable profile experienced the most socioeconomic risk across all measures. The other three profiles consistently fell in between on all contextual measures. Results add nuanced insights into contextual factors characterizing distinct resilience profiles with unique strengths and weaknesses. Paper 3 investigated the validity of dyadic language measurements across settings. Conversational turns (CTs) among 46 families were measured across two contexts—lab-based interactions and naturalistic recordings. This study examined convergent validity by probing relations between CT measures and contextual factors (SES, race/ethnicity, and stress). To examine concurrent validity, we analyzed relations between each CT approach and standardized assessments of children’s language skills. We found no relations among the three language measures or between either CT approach and social context variables. However, children’s race, ethnicity, and especially socioeconomic status were moderately to very strongly related to standardized language scores. Together, these three studies elucidate socioeconomic risk and resilience factors in early childhood development of cognitive and SE skills. Results have widespread implications for education, social, economic, and health research and policy.