Poverty, stress, and American Indian child development

University Of Colorado Denver, Aurora CO

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Abstract

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): This project seeks to explore the impact of poverty on the development of American Indian infants and toddlers in one northern plains tribe. Building on on-going collaborative work with community service providers in this tribe, and using both quantitative and qualitative methods in a sample of 290 families, it seeks to accomplish the following 5 aims: 1) to describe infant and toddler development using longitudinal analyses and developmental assessments at 4 time points over the first three years of life for children from this northern plains tribe; 2) to explore, using both ethnographic and quantitative methods, meaningful dimensions of the contexts in which infant and toddler development occurs in this tribe; 3) to test predictive models of parenting and child development in this reservation setting; 4) to link the data collected in this study with existing datasets from the same community in order to more fully articulate the impact of rural poverty on the health and development of parents and their children; and 5) to work with community service providers and policy makers to interpret the findings of this study in ways that can be efficiently translated into early childhood interventions in American Indian reservation communities.