Exploring the impacts of assets and vulnerabilities of families experiencing multidimensional poverty and income inequality on children's early cognitive, social, emotional and behavioural developmental outcomes in Scotland
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Date
27/11/2013Author
Treanor, Morag
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Abstract
Living in poverty and persistent low income has detrimental impacts on many facets
of the lives of parents and children. During the early years of the new millennium
this was of primary concern to the Scottish and UK governments: in response,
policies were implemented to improve children's developmental outcomes, and to
increase both maternal employment and levels of income for low paid and
unemployed families.
Previous qualitative research on families living in poverty revealed that families have
varying degrees of additional vulnerability depending on their levels of social assets,
e.g. social support, and financial vulnerabilities, e.g. debt and financial stress. High
levels of social assets appeared to attenuate, and low levels of social assets appeared
to exacerbate, the negative impacts of living in poverty. These social and financial
assets/vulnerabilities comprise two of the five domains of the Sustainable
Livelihoods Approach (SLA) quantified for use in this thesis.
This thesis explores what impacts, if any, social and financial assets/vulnerabilities
have on children's cognitive (C) development, as measured by naming vocabulary
and picture similarities, and on their social, emotional and behavioural (SEB)
development as measured by the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire. To
achieve this aim this research uses the first five sweeps of the annually-collected
longitudinal Growing up in Scotland (GUS) birth cohort study. The analysis uses the
technique of factor analysis to derive the latent constructs financial and social
assets/vulnerabilities, and OLS multiple regression analysis with quasi-variance to
test the associations. The research employs multiple dimensions of economic
disadvantage - longitudinal income poverty, material deprivation, longitudinal
income poverty and material deprivation combined, and longitudinal income
inequality - to explore the effects, not only between the lengths of time people have
lived in poverty, but also across the income inequality spectrum, i.e. persistent low
income versus persistent high income.
The results of the research show that high maternal social assets and financial
vulnerabilities separately are associated with higher and lower levels of child SEB
development respectively, especially for children living in persistent low income.
The relationship did not hold for children’s cognitive development. It also reveals
that children whose mothers are experiencing additional financial stress and debt
have lower CSEB scores (but not picture similarities), especially in relation to SEB
development. There is also a relationship between social and financial
assets/vulnerabilities: having high social assets is statistically associated with lower
financial stress and debt for those living with lower incomes. This thesis argues that
mothers, families and children living in poverty would benefit from policy and
practice interventions that support geographical proximity of family and friends, that
foster close and supportive wider family relationships, and that promote access to
credit that does not lead to unmanageable debt and detrimental levels of additional
financial stress. The research notes that while the SLA has been a useful theoretical
framework, effectively quantified, the GUS data are limited in how effectively it can
construct the SLA as it is not dedicated to its measurement.