Measurement and Model Building in Studying the Infl uence of Socioeconomic Status on Child Development

The process of child development is shaped by experience, and children who live in different socioeconomic strata have difference experiences. Thus, it should not be surprising that socioeconomic status (SES) is a pervasive predictor of child development. Children from higher SES families reliably fare better than children from lower SES families on a wide range of developmental outcomes from infancy to adulthood. Although some of the predictive power of SES may derive from its correlation with properties that are genetically transmitted from parents to their children (Rowe & Rodgers, 1997 ), a substantial literature argues that SES indexes properties of children’s environments that affect development. Recent reviews of this substantial literature argue also that the processes by which SES exerts its well-attested effects are not adequately understood (Bradley & Corwyn, 2002 ; Bornstein & Bradley, 2003 ; Conger & Donnellan, 2007 ; National Research Council and Institute of Medicine, 2000 ). Progress in understanding the mechanisms of SES infl uence requires measures that capture what about SES is relevant to children’s experience and models that capture how SES exerts its infl uence. The questions of how to measure SES and to model its infl uence are the topics of this chapter. In the sections that follow, we lay out the issues involved and illustrate the approaches that have been taken with selected research examples.