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Key Words socioeconomic status, poverty, achievement, adjustment, child well-being
* Abstract Socioeconomic status (SES) is one of the most widely studied constructs in the social sciences. Several ways of measuring SES have been proposed, but most include some quantification of family income, parental education, and occupational status. Research shows that SES is associated with a wide array of health, cognitive, and socioemotional outcomes in children, with effects beginning prior to birth and continuing into adulthood. A variety of mechanisms linking SES to child well-being have been proposed, with most involving differences in access to material and social resources or reactions to stress-inducing conditions by both the children themselves and their parents. For children, SES impacts well-being at multiple levels, including both family and neighborhood. Its effects are moderated by children's own characteristics, family characteristics, and external support systems.
INTRODUCTION
Socioeconomic status (SES) remains a topic of great interest to those who study children's development. This interest derives from a belief that high SES families afford their children an array of services, goods, parental actions, and social connections that potentially redound to the benefit of children and a concern that many low SES children lack access to those same resources and experiences, thus putting them at risk for developmental problems (Brooks-Gunn & Duncan 1997). The interest in SES as a global construct persists despite evidence that there is wide variability in what children experience within every SES level, despite evidence that the link between SES and child well-being varies as a function of geography, culture, and recency of immigration, and despite evidence that the relation between SES and child well-being can be disrupted by catastrophes and internal strife (Bradley & Corwyn 1999, Wachs 2000).
In this chapter we review the history of SES and provide an overview of the association between SES and children's well-being for three major domains of development (cognitive, socioemotional, health). Attention is given to models that attempt to explicate the connection between SES and these aspects of development. Finally, we offer a rationale for expanding attention to collective SES as a way of more fully instantiating the concepts of developmental systems theory into research on SES.
HISTORY AND DEFINITION
Social scientists have shown continued interest in SES even though there...