In what ways do parental working conditions affect child development? How do the child care arrangements that substitute for parental care affect child social and cognitive outcomes? How stable are these effects? This project will use the National Longitudinal Survey's Youth Cohort (1979 through 1988) and interviews with the mothers' children in 1986 and 1988 to investigate these interrelated issues. Our first specific aim is to develop more adequate measures of paternal working conditions using both longitudinal survey and archival data, and study the relationships between these and comparable measures for mothers within the context of child outcomes.
Our second aim i s to use the 1988 re-survey of the NLSY children to evaluate the stability of intergenerational transmission of parental working conditions' effects over time. Our third specific aim is to use the size of the data set (N-1, 362) to more fully evaluate hypotheses suggesting statistical interaction that have not been adequately evaluated with small samples. The significance of the project lies in its focus on the extent of transmission of intergenerational inequality to young children, its consideration of both maternal and paternal working conditions' effects on child outcomes, and its inclusion of child care arrangements as a critical intervening construct. Our key dependent variables include social and cognitive measures derived from the Achenbach Child Behavior Checklist and the Peabody Individual Achievement Test, with the Campos Temperament and HOME Scales acting as key intervening variables. Measurement of both paternal and maternal working conditions and child care arrangements will reflect both quality and stability. We will study 3-6 year olds in 1986 and 5-8 year olds in 1988, where samples include all for whom we can verify that there was some paternal working activity during the child's life, where child care data pertains to that child, and where we exclude children with disabilities or medical conditions that might constrain child care options. Our initial analyses will estimate a recursive causal model incorporating the key variables plus numerous controls for maternal perceptions and actions and maternal and paternal background. Our subsequent analyses will include longitudinal measures of child car arrangements and parental working conditions within a non-recursive framework estimated using LISREL VI.
| Rogers, S J; Parcel, T L; Menaghan, E G (1991) The effects of maternal working conditions and mastery on child behavior problems: studying the intergenerational transmission of social control. J Health Soc Behav 32:145-64 |
