{"id":768,"date":"2007-12-19T18:06:30","date_gmt":"2007-12-19T18:06:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/gregladen\/2007\/12\/19\/reduced-verbal-ability-in-afri\/"},"modified":"2007-12-19T18:06:30","modified_gmt":"2007-12-19T18:06:30","slug":"reduced-verbal-ability-in-afri","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/2007\/12\/19\/reduced-verbal-ability-in-afri\/","title":{"rendered":"Reduced Verbal Ability in African American Children"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Blogging<\/a><\/span>African American children may have reduced verbal ability compared to other children to a degree that is roughly equivalent to missing a year in school, according to a recently published paper. Is this evidence of a racial difference?The study by Sampson et.al., published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences included more than 200 children aged 6-12 living in Chicago, and followed these children over seven years. The study controlled for poverty, and interestingly, poverty was not found to be a good predictor of differences in verbal ability.The researchers consider the “Bell Curve” hypothesis, that “cognitive ability, or what they more generally consider the underlying dimension of intelligence [intelligence quotient (IQ)], is an important explanation for inequality in American society, and that its sources are largely genetic.” They point out that research on home environment and poverty explain some of the purported racial differences, but that very little research has been done on the effects of neighborhood and the racially based segregating effects of society.They argue that severely disadvantaged neighborhoods involve repressed communication infrastructures (and other factors) that impair cognitive development in verbal areas. The study shows that a key variable affecting cognitive ability was “concentrated disadvantage” … a characteristic of neighborhoods, especially segregated neighborhoods.The meat of the argument is as follows:<\/p>\n

We hypothesize that residing in a severely disadvantaged neighborhood cumulatively impedes the development of academically relevant verbal ability in children. The theoretical notion underlying our work is that spatial disadvantage is encompassed not in a single concurrent characteristic but rather in a synergistic composite of social factors that mark the qualitatively distinct aspect of growing up in truly disadvantaged neighborhoods… To consider only neighborhood poverty as the causal treatment of interest is too narrow, because poverty is strongly associated with other ecological characteristics, such as percentage of single-parent families, percentage of family members on welfare and unemployed, and racial segregation … We leave for future research to investigate potential mediating mechanisms; the logically prior or first-order task is to assess the causal status of the link between concentrated disadvantage and verbal ability.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And the conclusion:<\/p>\n

…exposure to concentrated disadvantage in Chicago appears to have had detrimental and long-lasting consequences for black children’s cognitive ability, rivaling in magnitude the effects of missing 1 year of schooling (3). Policy discussions of investment in children are to be applauded (1), but if our study is any guide, these discussions should be expanded to include a more comprehensive approach to investing in and thereby improving the neighborhood contexts to which children are exposed as they develop cognitive skills crucial for later achievement in life.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\n

Robert J. Sampson{dagger},{ddagger}, Patrick Sharkey\u00c2\u00a7, and Stephen W. Raudenbush (2007) Durable effects of concentrated disadvantage on verbal ability among African-American children. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA, 10.1073\/pnas.0710189104. Open Access Article. <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

African American children may have reduced verbal ability compared to other children to a degree that is roughly equivalent to missing a year in school, according to a recently published paper. Is this evidence of a racial difference?The study by Sampson et.al., published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences included more than … Continue reading Reduced Verbal Ability in African American Children<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[181,95,183,101,103,61],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5fhV1-co","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/768"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=768"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/768\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=768"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=768"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=768"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}