Poverty / SES & Development Flashcards
- Reduced access to play / stimulating env. + effects on parenting
2 major routes by which SES affects children:
- low SES = less stimulating env
- low SES = quality of parenting is low (in terms of sensitivity / responsiveness to child)
- Conger et al (1994)
→ how economic stress in family influences adolescents’ dev. problems
→ 198 f, 190 m, in rural Midwest of USA → lots of poverty + uncertainty about future prospects
→ series of interviews over 3 years, (7th-9th grades), parents + children
→ high levels of unhappiness + discontent for parents, irritability b/w kids & parents, adolescents experiment emotional + behavioural problems
→ poverty contributes to adolescents experiencing negative socialisation + learning dysfunctional behaviour
Evaluation of Conger et al (1994)
- Huge amount of rich, qualitative data
- Due to subjective nature of interviews, some aspects of participants’ responses may have been misunderstood or taken out of context
- Social desirability bias
- Only experiences from Midwestern USA therefore low transferability
- Impacts on social + cognitive development
- low SES = bullying, victimisation, rejection by peers
- bad peer relationships –> anxiety, social withdrawal, insecurity
- Hjalmarsson (2017)
→ effects of poverty on peer relationships at school
→ Swedish 8th graders from dif schools - stratified sampling
→ questionnaire + tests on language + cognitive skills
→ adolescents from low SES rejected by peers, unable to participate in activities, higher risk of victimisation
Evaluation of Hjalmarsson (2017)
- Could be used to inform future initiatives & intervention programmes for families in need
- May be other factors accounting for low cog functions, e.g. undiagnosed dyslexia
- Cultural bias → collectivist cultures may respond differently (more supportive)
- Difficult to isolate many factors that influence development which may be associated w/ SES
- Research has shown that the effects of poverty are uneven across different abilities
- Biological studies on structure of brain
- Kimberly Noble scanned brain structure of 1000 kids in US
- Looked in detail at SA + thickness of cortex → effects of SES on grey, white matter
- Showed variations b/w cortical SA esp. temporal + frontal regions
- Temporal regions = language processing, frontal regions = executive functioning
- Possible that these parts of the brain have the longest developmental trajectory & maybe this long period of development fives the env. enough time to influence development
- Effects were quite small, only about 1 or 2% of variability in brain structure explained by SES
- Also looked at FUNCTION of the brain
- Measuring electrical activity of the scalp by using electrodes & small voltages
- Changes in voltages as children carry out tasks
- One study tested children as they listened to dif sounds
- Were supposed to only listen to specific sounds & ignore other sounds
- From high SES, able to screen out info they were not supposed to, low SES could not
Explaining the electrodes study
- There was a problem in selective attention → correlations suggest causal pathways
- But there are LOTS of env. factors → which one?
- Fewer resources, parents less educated, household less structured, poorer neighbourhood, lower waged, nutrition
- Adaptation
- But, responses to low SES can also be thought of as an adaptation
- Children behave the way they do given the environment they are in
- A child in a more threatening env. may have to be more vigilant - can’t focus their attention need to be monitoring more widely
- Maybe the way that children make decisions & regulate their behaviour is because they are in a scarce env. → no point in having long term planning - need to take what is in front of them
- Resilience as a type of adaptation
- Humans have evolved dif strategies for resilience
- Resilience = when an individual maintains adaptive behaviour in spite of serious risk factors
POST-TRAUMATIC GROWTH E.G.
Last study on resilience = Werner (2005)
→ longitudinal study explored impacts of risk factors that can limit child’s future happiness / success
→ Hawaiian island of Kauai (40 years)
→ 30% had been exposed to risk factors (poverty, troubled homes, etc) - some of these participants experienced 4 or more risk factors by age 2
→ grew up into confident adults → protective factors WITHIN the individual may be the reason
