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Persistent poverty and children's cognitive development: evidence from the UK Millennium Cohort Study
Author(s) -
Dickerson Andrew,
Popli Gurleen K.
Publication year - 2016
Publication title -
journal of the royal statistical society: series a (statistics in society)
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.103
H-Index - 84
eISSN - 1467-985X
pISSN - 0964-1998
DOI - 10.1111/rssa.12128
Subject(s) - poverty , millennium cohort study (united states) , cohort , child poverty , cognitive development , child development , cognition , psychology , demography , percentile , developmental psychology , national child development study , cohort study , medicine , sociology , economic growth , economics , psychiatry , pathology , statistics , mathematics
Summary We use data from the four sweeps of the UK Millennium Cohort Study of children born at the turn of the 21st century to document the effect that poverty, and in particular persistent poverty, has on their cognitive development in their early years. Using structural equation modelling, we show that children born into poverty have significantly lower test scores at age 3, age 5 and age 7 years, and that continually living in poverty in their early years has a cumulative negative effect on their cognitive development. For children who are persistently in poverty throughout their early years, their cognitive development test scores at age 7 years are almost 20 percentile ranks lower than children who have never experienced poverty, even after controlling for a wide range of background characteristics and parental investment.