The proposed study brings together an interdisciplinary team of epidemiologists, psychologists, sociologists, economists, and statisticians focused on assessing the extent to which children's physical, emotional, and cognitive status reflect the influence of parental socioeconomic status, income trajectories, economic stress, and community characteristics. Analysis of these issues will be conducted using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), which has been the premier U.S. source of data on the economic status of U.S. families since 1968, and has resulted in over 600 journal articles, 250 books and book chapters, and 350 government reports, working papers, and dissertations. In 1997, the PSID fielded a Child Supplement (PSID-CDS) that interviewed all PSID participants who were the parents of children under 13 as well as one to two of their children. The PSID-CDS-collected information on the physical and mental health of the children, child behavior problems, psychosocial states of parent and child (self-efficacy, self-esteem, social support, etc.), cognitive abilities of the child, attitudinal data from parents, and community and school characteristics. It represents a depth and breadth of data collection never before found in a nationally representative sample By linking data collected in the CDS with data collected in the PSID, representing decades of data on the children's families (and grandparents, in some cases), it will be possible to address a series of focused questions regarding the determinants of health and psychosocial states in children. (1) How are parental socioeconomic status (SES), SES trajectories over decades, and parental economic strain associated with children's physical and mental health, psychosocial states, and cognitive development? (2) What is the impact of the community environment on the children's physical and mental health, psychosocial states, and cognitive development? 3) What is the association between race/ethnicity and immigrant status and child physical and mental health, psychosocial states, and cognitive development? Do individual measures of SES and/or measures of the community environment account for or modify race/ethnicity and immigrant status effects on children's physical and mental health, psychosocial states, and cognitive development? (4) Do parenting behavior and attitudes, home environment, and family structure mediate the association between SES and race/ethnicity effects and children's physical and mental health, psychosocial states and cognitive development? (5) What is the association between community characteristics and parenting behavior and attitudes, home environment, and family structure?
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