| ||||||
Childhood Exposure to Disadvantaged Neighborhoods Negatively affects Verbal Ability |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
From EurekAlert! - Breaking News: Childhood exposure to severely disadvantaged communities is linked to decreased verbal ability later in childhood, a lasting negative effect that continues even after moving out of the neighborhood, according to research that will be published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Living in "concentrated disadvantage" decreases later verbal test scores by about four IQ points, which is roughly equivalent to missing a year of school. The study was led by Robert Sampson, Henry Ford II Professor of the Social Sciences in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University, with Patrick Sharkey of New York University and Stephen Raudenbush of the University of Chicago. "For children, living in disadvantaged neighborhoods appears to contribute to a detrimental effect on trajectories of verbal ability. This negative impact on verbal ability persisted even after a child had moved from a disadvantaged to a non-disadvantaged neighborhood. The short-term negative impact of living in a segregated disadvantaged neighborhood includes increased exposure to violence and reduced access to safe public places for play. However, in addition to the immediate negative influences, children are exposed over time to specific kinds of social interactions that may contribute to a lasting effect on verbal development. To look beyond just economic situation, and define a neighborhood as one of "concentrated disadvantage," Sampson and colleagues examined the presence of six social factors in the lives of the children: welfare receipt, poverty, unemployment, female-headed households, segregation, and the number of children per household. Not only do these circumstances have a lasting impact on a child's language skills, it's not easily remedied by taking the child out of the neighborhood.
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
