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Disentangling the influence of socioeconomic risks on children's early self-control

Ng-Knight, T; Schoon, I; (2016) Disentangling the influence of socioeconomic risks on children's early self-control. Journal of Personality 10.1111/jopy.12288. (In press). Green open access

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Abstract

OBJECTIVE: Previous studies have shown that individual differences in self-control emerge early in childhood and predict a range of important outcomes throughout childhood and adulthood. There is however less knowledge about the social origins of self-control, including the mechanisms by which early socioeconomic adversity may lead to lower levels of self-control. This study aimed to extend understanding of the link between socioeconomic adversity and self-control by: (i) testing which individual aspects of socioeconomic risk uniquely predict lower self-control; (ii) testing whether objective socioeconomic risk operates independently of, or via, subjective parental stress; (iii) examining the interplay of socioeconomic risk factors and individual differences in children's temperament as predictors of early self-control. METHOD: Data were from a UK population birth cohort of 18,552 children born in 2000-01. RESULTS: Multiple individual socioeconomic risk factors have independent associations with children's self-control, including low parental education, income, and occupational class, insecure housing tenure, and younger parenthood. Results point to independent additive effects of exposure to objective and subjective risk. There was evidence of mothers' subjective stress partially mediating objective socioeconomic risks but only weak evidence of hypothesised interaction effects between temperament and socioeconomic risk. CONCLUSION: Results were consistent with additive risk and bioecological perspectives.

Type: Article
Title: Disentangling the influence of socioeconomic risks on children's early self-control
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1111/jopy.12288
Publisher version: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/jopy.12288
Language: English
Additional information: © 2016 The Authors. Journal of Personality Published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Keywords: self-control; self-regulation; effortful-control; socioeconomic risk; temperament
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education > UCL Institute of Education
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education > UCL Institute of Education > IOE - Social Research Institute
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1527391
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