Deleterious Effects Of Poverty Research Articles

The beneficial effect of growth mindset intervention for adolescents in economically disadvantaged areas of China

The existing research has explored the effects of growth mindset intervention on individuals in Western culture. This study sought to determine whether growth mindset intervention has a positive impact on adolescents in economically disadvantaged areas of China. Participants in this study were 324 junior high school students who were randomly divided into the intervention group and the control group. The intervention group received six weeks of intervention classes designed to help students learn, internalize, and reinforce the concept of growth mindset. The aims of intervention were to build students’ beliefs that the brain is plastic and that individuals can change by their efforts and help students acquire the strategies to cope with the difficulties. The control group was given six classes on mental health, including time management, habit formation, and memory strategies, which were unrelated to growth mindset. All participants’ implicit theory of intelligence, fixed-trait attributions, grit, and state anxiety were assessed in the pre-test and post-test. The results showed that compared with the control group, the intervention group had a significant increase in growth mindset, the level of grit, and decrease in fixed-trait attributions. That is, for students in the intervention group, strengthening of growth mindset was accompanied by more frequent use of process-focused attribution styles, more perseverance, and greater efforts when faced with challenges and setbacks. Collectively, the results suggested that having a strong growth mindset of intelligence may help students adopt more proactive coping strategies and protect them from the deleterious effects of poverty on student development.

Pathway to neural resilience: Self-esteem buffers against deleterious effects of poverty on the hippocampus.

Human neuroimaging studies have shown that people living in poverty tend to suffer hippocampal atrophy, which leads to impaired memory and learning throughout life. However, behavioral studies demonstrate that poor people with high self-esteem are often exempt from the deleterious effect of poverty and instead possess a happy and successful life. Here we investigated whether high self-esteem can buffer against the deleterious effects of poverty, as indicated by low subjective socioeconomic status (SSS), on the hippocampal gray matter volume (GMV) in a large cohort of young participants (N = 280). As expected, findings revealed that although low (vs. high) SSS was linked with a smaller hippocampal GMV, the deleterious effect of low SSS on hippocampal GMV was alleviated when the participants have high self-esteem. Commonality analyses further confirmed this observation. The current study suggests that positive psychological resources such as self-esteem may provide protection for the hippocampal atrophy in adversity. Hum Brain Mapp 37:3757-3766, 2016. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Growth mindset tempers the effects of poverty on academic achievement

Two largely separate bodies of empirical research have shown that academic achievement is influenced by structural factors, such as socioeconomic background, and psychological factors, such as students' beliefs about their abilities. In this research, we use a nationwide sample of high school students from Chile to investigate how these factors interact on a systemic level. Confirming prior research, we find that family income is a strong predictor of achievement. Extending prior research, we find that a growth mindset (the belief that intelligence is not fixed and can be developed) is a comparably strong predictor of achievement and that it exhibits a positive relationship with achievement across all of the socioeconomic strata in the country. Furthermore, we find that students from lower-income families were less likely to hold a growth mindset than their wealthier peers, but those who did hold a growth mindset were appreciably buffered against the deleterious effects of poverty on achievement: students in the lowest 10th percentile of family income who exhibited a growth mindset showed academic performance as high as that of fixed mindset students from the 80th income percentile. These results suggest that students' mindsets may temper or exacerbate the effects of economic disadvantage on a systemic level.

Buffering the Negative Impact of Poverty on Youth: The Power of Purpose in Life

Adolescent poverty is associated with increased antisocial and decreased prosocial behaviors. Attenuating these negative effects is relevant for both individual and societal well-being. Research exploring how youth in poverty can escape antisocial behaviors and move toward prosocial behaviors has been limited primarily to risk factors. From a strengths perspective, we sought to understand how a potential resiliency factor—purpose in life—could protect youngsters from the deleterious effects of poverty. We conceptualized purpose in life as a central, future-oriented, goal-organizing framework that provides adolescents reasons to resist antisocial behavior and engage in prosocial behaviors. In moderation analyses, purpose in life mitigated the effects of poverty on antisocial behavior (i.e., disobedience and bullying), but failed to boost prosocial traits and behaviors for youth in poverty. We emphasize the importance of developing a sense of purpose in economically disadvantaged youth for bettering their lives and communities.

Poverty and Awakening Cortisol in Adolescence: The Importance of Timing in Early Life.

The deleterious effects of poverty on mental and physical health are routinely argued to operate, at least in part, via dysregulation of the hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis, although empirical examinations connecting poverty with HPA axis functioning are rare. Research on the effects of timing of poverty is a particularly neglected aspect of this relationship. This study uses 15 years of prospective data from the Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development to assess how exposure to poverty during infancy, childhood, and adolescence is related to awakening cortisol (n = 826), a marker of HPA axis functioning. Among female participants, poverty exposure in infancy and adolescence, but not childhood, was negatively associated with awakening cortisol. Poverty exposure was unrelated to cortisol among male participants. The importance of timing and gender differences are discussed along with directions for future research.

No More Kin: Exploring Race, Class, and Gender in Family Networks

No More Kin: Exploring Race, Class, and Gender in Family Networks. Anne R. Roschelle. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. 1997. 235 pp. ISBN 07619-0159-0. $21.95 cloth. Studies of minority families conducted in the 1960s and 1970s, mostly in the ethnographic tradition, sought to correct the negative stereotypes perpetuated by theorists of the culture of poverty. Instead of depicting distinct family patterns (e.g., extended families) in ethno-racial minorities as deviant, these scholars portrayed positive images of how, in the midst of economic deprivation, minority families participated in extended social support networks, mostly through women. This networking was seen as a deliberate strategy to offset the deleterious effects of poverty. Roschelle's provocative study contends that, although economic resources are salient predictors of participation in support networks, their effect is precisely the opposite. She argues that the constraints of a hostile economic system have contributed to the impoverishment of minority families, which has prevented them from participating in exchange networks and from realizing their familistic identities. The elaborate social support networks characteristic of urban minorities two decades ago may no longer exist. The author makes this powerful point by meticulously examining cultural and structural determinants of participation in social support networks among different ethno-racial groups and through the lens of an analytical framework that incorporates race, class, and gender as systems of oppression. The result is a fine study with important theoretical and policy implications. After a detailed discussion and critique of the main theoretical approaches to the study of extended networks within both the cultural and structural perspectives, Roschelle presents the culturestructure nexus, a model that incorporates both perspectives. This integrative perspective allows the examination of the simultaneous impact of cultural and structural factors on family organization among ethno-racial groups. From this vantage point, the author assesses the effect of the interlocking hierarchies of class, gender, and race on network support. Empirically, Roschelle compares help that is given and received by family and friends among African Americans, Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, and non-Hispanic Whites. She also examines the effects of class and gender on support networks and the propensity for extended living arrangements for each group. Her study is based on the first wave of the National Survey of Families and Households, a nationally representative probability sample survey conducted in 1987 and 1988. She includes indicators of cultural attitudes toward giving and receiving help, measures of socioeconomic resources, demographic variables, and a set of variables to measure availability and proximity of friends and family. Her main dependent variables represent three dimensions of support: monetary resources, child care, and household assistance. Due to significant gender differences in the types of help given and received, the author used child care when she analyzes women's networks and household assistance in the analyses of men's networks. …

The empowerment of children: who decides?

While the health and well-being of children in general continues to improve, there remains a definitive health care divide. In the UK one-quarter of all children live in abject poverty, their lives shortened by the deleterious effects of poverty on life expectancy. Regardless of their background, children are united by common features of childhood, one being the concept of children as immature adults and, therefore, incapable of making important decisions. Such concepts are not conducive to the development of children as rational individuals with the ability to reason and make appropriate judgements. Thus, it is the aim of this paper to identify the internal and external forces which prevent the empowerment of children, more specifically the empowerment of children to make decisions about health care choices. The presumption is that the exposure of obstructive elements will reveal the vital components required to provide children with the privilege of choice. Although legislation such as the Children Act 1989 has sought to empower children by recognizing that the child has a ‘voice’, there remains the potential for conflict to arise when the child ‘fails to conform’ to popular opinion. Moreover, it is possible that without explicit empowerment, those in a position of assumed power will seek to overrule the child.

Governance Structure, Resource Allocation, and Equity Policy

Educational inequality remains a major challenge to policymakers as our nation prepares to enter the 21st century. As social institutions, public schools are shaped by the deleterious effects of poverty, family disorganization, and racial and cultural isolation. Inequality in the life chances of children growing up in different socioeconomic environments is clearly evident in the schools they attend (Educational Testing Service, 1991; Kozol, 1991; Orfield & Reardon, 1992). Children from middle-class families are likely to attend suburban schools with an advanced curriculum supported by a stable tax base. In the inner city, minority children who come from low-income backgrounds are likely to concentrate in schools that lack basic supplies because of insufficient funds. Physical facilities are noticeably inferior in inner-city schools. Consequently, significant inequity exists in student access to knowledge and to instruction (Darling-Hammond, in press). Many minority youths are assigned to general education tracks with low academic expectations, whereas students from middle-class families are enrolled in collegepreparatory programs (Oakes, 1992). Too often, educational opportunities are socially structured.

Juvenile Delinquency and Economic Trend

F LUCTUATIONS in the number of cases brought into Juvenile Court from year to year are of interest to the general public as well as to professional workers in this field and are interpreted in various ways, the interpretation frequently depending upon the prejudices or purposes of the observer. Thus, a public official may call attention to a decrease in the incidence of delinquency as evidence of the efficiency of his administration. Advocates of a particular delinquency prevention program are apt to cite such statistics as proof of the benefit of their particular program. Similarly, the opponents of a particular official or of a particular preventive program are quick to quote rising delinquency figures in support of their contention. It happens that in many American communities there was a marked decline in the incidence of juvenile court cases between the years I929 and I934. As a result, in many cities individuals or agencies claimed credit for decreasing delinquency by virtue of this or that local policy or activity. Reports and publicity of this kind, moreover, frequently emphasized the thought that the decrease in delinquency was accomplished in spite of the increasing unemployment and economic distress of the depression. In other words, it was, and is today, generally taken for granted that juvenile delinquency increases in periods of depression and decreases in periods of prosperity. At the present time when there is so much discussion as to the effect of the war upon delinquency the interpretation of delinquency trends is strongly influenced by the popular belief that in times of increased employment and business activity a decrease in delinquency would ordinarily take place. So fixed is this opinion in the minds, not only of the general public, but of professional workers as well, that relatively little attention has been paid to the actual data of the past decade, and various attempts have been made to explain away data which point to a contrary conclusion. Yet, an understanding of the relationship between juvenile delinquency and economic trend is of great importance to Probation Officers and others concerned with the problem of delinquency, not only for purposes of administrative planning and because of its significance in attempts to evaluate various techniques and policies, but also because it throws a unique light upon certain causal factors which may not have been fully appreciated heretofore. Thus, whereas the deleterious effects of poverty and privation have been widely emphasized as causal factors, it has apparently not been sufficiently recognized that prosperity and economic expansion also involve certain factors that play an important role in the causation of delinquency.