This study assesses the consequences of housing instability during the first 5 years of a child's life for a host of school readiness outcomes. Using data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study (n = 2,810), this study examines the relation between multiple moves and children's language and literacy and behavior problems at…

Explaining inconsistency may serve as an important mechanism for driving the process of causal learning. But how might this process generate amended beliefs? One way that explaining inconsistency may promote discovery is by guiding exploratory, hypothesis-testing behavior. In order to investigate this, a study with young children ranging in age…

Beginning in sixth grade at an average age of 11.9 years, 416 adolescents and their parents participated in 4 waves of data collection involving family observations and multiple-reporter assessments. Ecological theory and the process-person-context-time (PPCT) model guided the hypotheses and analyses. Lagged, growth curve models revealed that…

Bronfenbrenner's (1979) ecological model proposes that events in higher order social ecosystems should influence human development through their impact on events in lower order social ecosystems. This proposition was tested with respect to ecological violence and the development of children's aggression via analyses of 3 waves of data (1 wave…

A crucial skill in scientific and everyday reasoning is the ability to interpret data. The present study examined how data features influence data interpretation. In Experiment 1, one hundred and thirty-three 9-year-olds, 12-year-olds, and college students (mean age = 20 years) were shown a series of data sets that varied in the number of…

Tattling, defined as the reporting to a second party of norm violations committed by a third party, is a frequent but little-studied activity among young children. Participant observation and quantitative sampling are used to provide a detailed characterization of tattling in 2 preschools (initial mean age = 4.08 years, N = 40). In these…

The present study used Canadian National Longitudinal data to examine a model of the mechanisms through which the effects of neighborhood socioeconomic conditions impact young children's verbal and behavioral outcomes (N = 3,528; M age = 5.05 years, SD= 0.86). Integrating elements of social disorganization theory and family stress models, and…

In cross-cultural child development research there is often a need to translate instruments and instructions to languages other than English. Typically, the translation process focuses on ensuring linguistic equivalence. However, establishment of linguistic equivalence through translation techniques is often not sufficient to guard against…

A 2-wave longitudinal study of personality in adolescence was conducted with data obtained at ages 12 and 17 years from approximately 60 European American and 60 second-generation Chinese American youth. At Time 1 they completed the Children's Personality Questionnaire and at Time 2 they completed the High School Personality Questionnaire and…