Toward a Social Care Program of Research: A Population-Level Study of Neighborhood Effects on Child Development

Abstract

The article reports results from a Human Early Learning Partnership initiative that aims to address limitations within the literature concerning neighborhood effects on child development. Problems include the tendency for studies to (a) rely on small samples of children, (b) focus on high-risk populations, (c) define neighborhood by Census boundaries, (d) attend only to 1 or 2 developmental domains, and (e) adhere to a narrow understanding of socioeconomic status. By collecting data from a near-census of kindergarten children in British Columbia, Canada, using the Early Development Instrument, our research addresses all 5 problems. Findings reported in this article lay the groundwork for the Human Early Learning Partnership's much more ambitious program of social care research that aims to measure directly the processes by which physical and social settings influence human development in the formative early years, rather than to infer them from data routinely collected for other purposes. The article concludes by inviting international colleagues to critically evaluate our program of research in its early days of implementation.

Notes

¹ Janus and Offord (2007) provide reliability and validity evidence for the EDI. Internal consistency reliability for each of the five domains was satisfactory, ranging between .84 and .96. Two different intraclass correlations were used to examine patterns of within-group and between-group variability. Measures of nonindependence of domain scores ranged from .20 to .31, reflecting moderate variability attributable to teachers or classrooms, whereas measures of the reliability of class-level domain scores were acceptable at .76 to .84. With regard to concurrent validity, EDI scores on two domains (language and cognitive development, and communication skills and general knowledge) were moderately correlated (.31 and .47, respectively) with a standardized test of receptive vocabulary, the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test.

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²The personal costs incurred by women who sacrifice employment to perform this important community-level work, including forgone wages, career advances, pension entitlement, and so on, are important to acknowledge but are beyond the scope of this article (see Kershaw 2005).