Abstract
Wealth plays a pervasive role in sustaining inequality and is more inequitably distributed than household income. Research has identified that wealth contributes to children’s educational outcomes. However, the specific mechanisms accounting for these outcomes are unknown. Using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) and its supplements, SEM was used to test a hypothesized longitudinal chain of mediating processes. Framed by the parent investment model, this study tracks children and their parents over twenty-seven years, from pre-birth to early adulthood. The analytic sample was comprised of 1247 young people who were between 6–12 years of age (M= 5.66, SD= 2.12) in 1997, the first wave of the PSID’s Child Development Supplement. This analytic sample was roughly equivalent by gender (N= 774; 53% identified as female and N= 693; 47% identified as male). The racial/ethnic background of participants was nearly an equal split between individuals who identified as White (N= 666; 45%) or Black (N= 634; 43%), with an additional 7% (N= 97) who identified as “Hispanic,” 2% (N= 40) as “Other,” 1% (N= 20) as Asian or Pacific Islander, and less than 1% (N= 6) who identified as American Indian or Alaskan Native. The results indicated that wealth (a) engenders parental and child processes—primarily expectations and achievement—that promote educational success, (b) plays a different role across the life course, and (c) that pre-birth wealth has a significant mediated relationship to educational attainment seventeen years later. These findings advance understanding of specific mediating mechanisms by which wealth may foster children’s educational success across the life course, as well as how wealth may differentially shape educational outcomes in childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood.
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26 February 2020
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Acknowledgements
The first author was supported by a grant from Poverty Solutions, at the University of Michigan. Thank you to Fabian Pfeffer for his insights about wealth, stratification, and the PSID and thank you to Meichu Chen for her assistance wrangling the PSID dataset for this research.
Authors’ Contributions
MD conceived of the study, coordinated and conducted data analyses, and coordinated writing; AM conducted data analyses, contributed to the conceptual framework and to writing; RM contributed to the conceptual framework, interpretation of analyses and to writing. All authors contributed to the writing of, read, and approved of the final manuscript.
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The first author was supported by a grant from Poverty Solutions, at the University of Michigan.
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These publicly available data are freely available online, via the PSID Data Center.
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This research was conducted in accordance with American Psychological Association standards for the conduct of research. This research was deemed not human subjects research at the University of Michigan, because it analyzes publicly available data that contains no identifiers (i.e., the Panel Survey of Income Dynamics, or PSID).
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Diemer, M.A., Marchand, A.D. & Mistry, R.S. Charting How Wealth Shapes Educational Pathways from Childhood to Early Adulthood: A Developmental Process Model. J Youth Adolescence 49, 1073–1091 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10964-019-01162-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10964-019-01162-4