SOCIOECONOMIC STATUS AND CHILD DEVELOPMENT 1

Annotated Bibliography

Duncan, Greg J., et al. (2017). Moving Beyond Correlations in Assessing the Consequences of

Poverty. The Annual Review of Psychology, 68(68), pp. 10.1-10.22

This literature review investigates the relationship between a family’s socioeconomic

status and developmental outcomes for its children. It summarizes more than a hundred primary
research articles addressing this topic. It finds that although there is “nearly universal”
correlation between poverty and children’s outcomes, the impact of socioeconomic deprivation is
not very strong. It is divided into several sections, the first of is an introduction that briefly
defines the key terms used in the review. The content sections include “Why Poverty May
Hinder Healthy Development,” “Developmental Perspectives: Poverty Across Childhood and
Adolescence,” “Assessing causal consequences of poverty: Methods and Results,” and
“Implications for Research.” The literature review concludes that the field requires more studies
assessing the causal impact of socioeconomic impact, as opposed to looking merely at
correlational and quasi-correlational evidence. It suggests some experimental manipulations that
might allow researchers to accomplish this goal.

This text is valuable because it is published in an academic journal that is highly

esteemed within the field. Annual Review of Psychology has a 2017 impact factor of 22.774, and
a 5-year impact factor of 30.519. It is the highest ranked journal within the field of psychology.
On Web of Science, this paper is noted for being a “Highly Cited Paper,” and has been cited in
other publications 28 times since 2017. Furthermore, it summarizes a wide variety of articles
within the field, and articulates the community consensus that although socioeconomic status is
definitely associated with child developmental outcomes, the nature and strength of this linkage
still remains unclear and requires further study. The other primary research articles included in
this annotated bibliography generally agree on this point – some found very strong associations
between socioeconomic status and child development, while others found only weak
associations.

Fernald, L. C., Weber, A., Galasso, E., Ratsifandrihamanana, L. (2011). Socioeconomic

gradients and child development in a very low income population: Evidence from

Madagascar. Developmental Science, 14(4), pp. 832-847.

This study, from our very own UC Berkeley, looks at the effects on child development of
growing up in different socioeconomic areas. The introduction summarizes the current research
on how greater poverty is usually associated with poorer developmental outcomes, and
articulates how children in an extremely poor and developing country like Madagascar might
face different challenges than poor children in a developed country like the United States. The
methodology involved sampling 3-6-year-old children in 150 communities in Madagascar. Child
SOCIOECONOMIC STATUS AND CHILD DEVELOPMENT 2

development was assessed through testing of children’s visual-spatial processing, reasoning,

memory, language, and social and emotional development. Considerations were made for
cultural context, as translations to local dialects were often necessary in administering tests that
had been made in English. Socioeconomic status was measured by surveying the parents about
maternal educational attainment and a household wealth index. The study found that
socioeconomic factors had a strong association with child performance, and developmental
disparities between wealthier and poorer children grew more pronounced as they got older. The
paper suggests “targeting younger children with early childhood development interventions” as a
way of helping disadvantaged children.

This study is unique and valuable because it focuses on child development an area of the
world that has been little studied. Most other studies in this annotated bibliography draw samples
from populations in the United States, Canada, Australia, and the UK. These are all English-
speaking and developed countries. Thus, this paper provides a novel perspective on the issue –
how does poverty affect children in a community and country that is systematically poor? Unlike
some other studies in this bibliography, this paper found strong links between socioeconomic
factors and child performance, and developmental disparities that increased with age. Along with
the studies by Kieffer and Strang and Piasta, it suggests targeting younger children with
educational efforts to help ameliorate these disparities.

Hassan, R., Mills, A. S., Day, K. L., Van Lieshout, R. J., Schmidt, L. A. (2019). Relations among

Temperament, Familial Socioeconomic Status, and Inhibitory Control in Typically

Developing Four-Year-Old Children. Journal of Child and Family Studies, pp. 1-9.

This Canadian primary research study investigates the relationship between a child’s
ability to focus and exert mental inhibitory control with socioeconomic status. Inhibitory control
was measured by placing a box of attractive toys in front of a child, and asking the child not to
touch them. The object of the assessment is to see the child will obey without grabbing a toy. A
questionnaire filled out by the parent asked them to elucidate on their socioeconomic background
and current status. The study found that children with good attention focusing skills saw no
correlation between socioeconomic status and inhibition, while children with low attention
focusing skills benefited from being in an “enriched” environment and suffered when raised in a
“poorer” environment. Also, the study found that boys had lower inhibitory control when
compared to girls, and raises the question of whether this disparity is due to nature or nurture.
The discussion and implications section of the paper mentions the issue of low sample size and
statistical power. The mean household income of participants was rather high as the study was
conducted in a relatively affluent area of Canada.

This study is unique in this bibliography because it studies a cohort in Canada, and looks
at inhibitory control as the dependent variable. Most other studies investigated language,
vocabulary, memory, or executive function as the dependent variable, so this is a unique way of
looking at it. The results of the study were mixed, as was the case for several other primary
studies – some children did see a correlation between socioeconomic status and inhibition, while
SOCIOECONOMIC STATUS AND CHILD DEVELOPMENT 3

others did not. Also, like the Sohr-Preston et al. study, it found gender disparities between boys
and girls, and questions the cause of the differences.

Kieffer, M. J. (2011). Before and after third grade: Longitudinal evidence for the shifting role of

socioeconomic status in reading growth. Reading and Writing, 25(7), pp. 1725-1746.

This American study looks at the relationship between socioeconomic status and
children’s’ reading growth between kindergarten and eighth grade in a nationally representative
United States cohort. The introduction acknowledges that while there is generally understood to
be a relationship between socioeconomic status and a child’s early reading level, there is less
research on how the reading level changes and develops over time. The current study aims to
clarify this relationship, and accomplished this by using data from an earlier study known as the
Early Childhood Longitudinal Study. The dataset consisted of 9,189 students who were followed
from kindergarten through the eighth grade. Their socioeconomic backgrounds and reading
achievement levels had been assessed through this period. The study found results that generally
aligned with previous research described in the introduction section. However, surprisingly, it
also saw that “the effect of SES on reading growth was found to change direction before and
after third grade.” Children with lower socioeconomic status demonstrated faster reading growth
between kindergarten and third grade, but those gains were reversed from third to eighth grade.
Thus, the achievement gap decreases, and then increases again. The authors write that this might
suggest that because early schooling acts as an intervention to compensate for students’
socioeconomic backgrounds. The limitations of this study include a lack of consideration for
mediating factors and flaws within the measures used to determine students’ literacy, vocabulary,
and comprehension.

This study is useful because it is a very comprehensive longitudinal study that follows a
cohort of children through a long period. Some other longitudinal studies include those by
Najman et al., Raffington et al., Rowe, and Sohr-Preston et al. The cohort of 9,189 is also
extremely large in comparison to some of the other studies in this bibliography. The findings of
this study are interesting and unique because the researchers describe the unusual trend of
children with less advantaged backgrounds demonstrating faster developmental growth before
the third grade, and slower growth after that time point. Along with the studies by Fernald and
Shang and Piasta, it suggests focusing on early schooling as a means of mitigating the impact of
socioeconomic disadvantage in children.

Letourneau, N. L., Duffett-Leger, L., Levac, L., Watson, B., Young-Morris, C. (2013).

Socioeconomic status and child development: A meta-analysis. Journal of Emotional and

Behavioral Disorders, 21(3), pp. 211-224.

This study aimed to conduct “a meta-analysis of research on the relationship between

composite measures of SES and developmental outcomes for children and adolescents between
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the ages of birth to 19 years of age.” The introduction summarizes how lower socioeconomic
status is widely seen as being strongly linked to the well-being and development of children. The
study’s methodology involved searching a wide variety of databases for articles that included
measures of socioeconomic status and looked at developmental outcomes of interest; literacy,
aggression, and depression. Of thousands of articles, only 33 met all the rigorous inclusion
criteria. The researchers found that the effects of socioeconomic status on the three outcomes
was generally small, but significant. Socioeconomic status was stated to be only weakly
correlated with academic achievement. The authors suggest that other factors related to
socioeconomic level, like parental interaction with children and family cohesion, might provide a
better causal link to child achievement. In the discussion section, it is noted that relatively few
studies met the inclusion criteria for this meta-analysis. Therefore, its generalizability may be
limited.

This study is novel because it is a meta-analysis of research on child development and

socioeconomic status. Instead of gathering and drawing conclusions on its own primary data, it
searched for patterns on a database of papers that addressed this topic and summarized its
findings. Like the literature review by Duncan et al., which also synthesizes information from a
wide variety of primary research sources, it notes that socioeconomic status has only a small
effect on child developmental outcomes. It stresses that other factors are likely to be involved
and require further study.

Najman, J. M., Aird, R., Bor, W., O’Callaghan, M., Williams, G. M., Shuttlewood, G. J. (2004).

The generational transmission of socioeconomic inequalities in child cognitive

development and emotional health. Social Science & Medicine, 58(6), pp. 1147-1158.

This comprehensive longitudinal primary research study from Australia investigates how
socioeconomic inequality can be passed on from the parent generation to the offspring, affecting
the emotional development and mental health of their children. The study registered 8556
pregnant women in Queensland, Australia, and followed them and their children until 14 years
after the birth. The socioeconomic status of the family was recorded, and the child’s development
was tracked each year with verbal comprehension tests, motor skill tests, reasoning skills tests,
IQ tests, and mental health assessments. The study found that children from low-income families
had higher incidence of problems when it came to mental health and language and reasoning
ability. It found that teenage motherhood and single motherhood often posed a major risk factor
for the well-being of the child. The study states firmly that “the script for these children’s lives
has been substantially written by the time they reach the age of 14.” Thus, socioeconomic
disadvantage has a way of entrenching itself in the next generation.

This study is unique in that it is from Australia, and in that it followed children for such a
long period of time between birth and age 14. It utilized a large cohort of 8556 individuals, and
only the Kieffer study was larger. This study was like others in that it assessed verbal
comprehension and executive function, but different in that it also looked at children’s IQ scores.
None of the other, more recent studies examined IQ very closely, possibly because of the flaws
SOCIOECONOMIC STATUS AND CHILD DEVELOPMENT 5

that have now become apparent in that test as a means of measuring intelligence. Unlike the
papers that found weak correlations, this study found a strong relationship between family
income and problems with child development.

Raffington, L., Prindle, J. J., Shing, Y. L. (2018). Income gains predict cognitive functioning

longitudinally throughout later childhood in poor children. Developmental Psychology,

54(7), pp. 1232-1243.

This American primary study examines longitudinal dynamics between family income
and child cognitive dynamics later in childhood. It involved 1,168 children between the ages of
4.6 and 12 years, of which 19% qualified as living in poverty. Family income, poverty level, and
cognition scores were taken for the children at the time points of 4.6 years, kindergarten, Grade
1, Grade 3, Grade 4, Grade 5, and Grade 6. Cognition scores were measured using vocabulary
and mathematics subtests. The study found that children from poorer families had lower
cognitive scores to begin with and demonstrated less growth during childhood. However, it also
found that family income did not predict cognitive change – in fact, a child’s cognitive score
predicted income gain for the family. The authors hypothesize that this may be due to children
with low cognitive scores requiring additional attention and resources that prevent the parents
from earning more at work. Furthermore, it showed that parental income is a strong indicator for
children’s math and vocabulary performance, but only in children experiencing poverty.
Limitations of the study include a lack of causality, and a lack of generalizability amongst mostly
middle-class participants. The authors suggest studying maternal mental health and genetic
profiles in further research.

This study is one of several longitudinal studies included in this annotated bibliography,
following children from ages 4 to 12. It was also like other studies in using vocabulary as a
means of measuring development. However, it is unique in also testing a child’s mathematical
ability to get a sense of their cognitive functioning. This study generally supported the idea that
poor family socioeconomic status is correlated with worse child developmental outcomes, but
with a few important caveats. Although children from poorer families had lower cognitive scores
to begin with and generally demonstrated less growth, family income does not always predict
cognitive change over time.

Rowe, M. L. (2008). Child-directed speech: Relation to socioeconomic status, knowledge of

child development and child vocabulary skill. Journal of Child Language, 35(1), pp. 185-

205.

This longitudinal primary research study studies how American family members from
different socioeconomic status levels communicate with their children, and the impact that this
communication has on children’s language development. The experiment involved recruiting
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families and videotaping parent-child interactions in the home, which were transcribed and
coded for instances of parent-child speech. The children’s vocabulary comprehension was
measured with the Peabody Picture Vocabulary test at the time points of age 2 years and 6
months, and 3 years and 6 months. In the results section, the study discusses its finding that
parents who talked more to their children and used language of greater complexity raised
children with more vocabulary skill. Furthermore, parents from more educated and advantaged
backgrounds had a more diverse lexicon, and could pass this advantage along to their children.
The discussion section suggests finding a sample that is more generalizable towards all American
parents. The study is also limited in that it does not reflect cultural differences in child rearing.

This study is unique in that it studies parent-child interactions, which tend to differ
between socioeconomic classes and education levels. It was similar to other studies in that it
focused on a child’s language skill and vocabulary as a means of quantifying development. Other
studies that employed similar means of measurement include those by Strang and Piasta, Sohr-
Preston et al., Raffington et al., Najman et al., and Kieffer. This study strongly showed that
parents’ interactions with children had a strong impact on child development, and that parent
interaction quality had much to do with the parent’s educational background. This is a similar
effect to that reported by Sohr-Preston et al. Thus, Rowe comes out strongly in favor of the idea
that family socioeconomic status has a strong impact on child developmental outcomes. The
study suggests that this is the mechanism by which social inequalities can be transmitted from
generation to generation.

Sohr-Preston, S. L., Scaramella, L. V., Martin, M. J., Neppl, T. K., Ontai, L., Conger, R. (2013).

Parental socioeconomic status, communication, and children's vocabulary development:

A third‐generation test of the family investment model. Child Development, 84(3), pp.

1046-1062.

This longitudinal study studied 3 generations in a family and evaluated the relationship
between socioeconomic status, parental education, parental investment in children, and child
developmental outcomes. This American study is unique in the literature for spanning a large
amount of time (from the 1980s to the 2010s) to look at 3 successive generations within a
household. Developmental outcomes were measured by assessing the child’s vocabulary. Data
was collected from Generation 1 parents during Generation 2’s adolescence, and then again
during G3 children’s adolescence. The study found that parental income and educational level
were excellent predictors of children’s development and eventual educational attainment.
However, it found that parental education was not directly correlated with the child’s vocabulary.
Interestingly, it found that parent communication was predictive for sons’ achievement, but only
strongly correlated for daughters – possibly suggesting a gendered issue with child rearing. The
discussion section suggests looking at differences in parental communication styles in relation to
a child’s gender. The flaws of this study include a small sample size, as tracking families over
more than 20 years inevitably resulted in participants dropping out, or not birthing another
generation of children to study. The demographics of the sample group were primarily white and
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rural, limiting its generalizability and thus leaving out the potential impact of cultural diversity in
child-rearing practices.

This study is longitudinal, which seems to be a theme in the body of research surrounding
this topic. However, it was different in that it studied three successive generations within a single
family, rather than simply following a child as they age. Like several other studies mentioned in
this annotated bibliography, it uses a child’s vocabulary as a marker for tracking development.
This study is comparable to the one by Rowe in that it also finds that parental education is
predictive for child development. Like the study by Hassan et al., it found differences in
developmental outcomes that seemed dependent on a child’s gender.

Strang, T. M. and Piasta, S. B. (2016). Socioeconomic differences in code-focused emergent

literacy skills. Reading and Writing, 29(7), pp. 1337-1362.

This study examined the relationship between family socioeconomic status and literacy in
children enrolled at a single early childhood center. The introduction discusses previous studies
of socioeconomic status and literary achievement, defined by emergent literary skills. In the
current study, family socioeconomic status was measured through self-reported of income,
maternal education, and subsidy receipts. Literacy was measured through a battery of language
tests including recognition of letter names and sounds, alliteration, rhyming, print knowledge,
and phonological awareness. The researchers found that socioeconomic status played a role in
preschool entry and the level of literacy that children begin at, but does not play an evident role
in the rate of growth in literacy. These results indicate the importance of addressing literacy skill
gaps early in childhood to ameliorate the effects of family socioeconomic disparity. The
limitations of this study include that it was narrow, focusing on one childhood program.

This study is unique in that it was limited to the community surrounding one single early
childhood center. In contrast, many of the other studies in this annotated bibliography utilized
much larger sample sizes drawn on a regional or national level. For this reason, this study has
much less generalizability than those done on a larger scale. Like many other studies, Strang and
Piasta also opted to test vocabulary and language skills as a means of measuring a child’s
developmental progress. The results of this study were a nuanced view of the relationship
between child development and socioeconomic status – although socioeconomic status strongly
influences where children start in development, it does not have so much of an effect on their
educational progress. Along with Fernald et al. and Kieffer, Strang and Piasta advocate focusing
attention on early childhood education to mitigate socioeconomic disadvantage among young
children.