Environmental inequality and disparities in school readiness: The role of neurotoxic lead.

Developmental science has increasingly scrutinized how environmental hazards influence child outcomes, but few studies examine how contaminants affect disparities in early skill formation. Linking research on environmental inequality and early childhood development, this study assessed whether differences in exposure to neurotoxic lead explain sociodemographic gaps in school readiness. Using panel data tracking a representative sample of 1266 Chicago children (50% female, 16% White, 30% Black, 49% Hispanic, µage = 5.2 months at baseline, collected 1994-2002), analyses quantified the contribution of lead contamination to class and racial disparities in vocabulary skills and attention problems at ages 4 and 5. Results suggested that lead contamination explains 15%-25% and 33%-66% of the disparities in each outcome, respectively, although imprecise estimates preclude drawing firm inferences about attention problems.

Skill-Based Contextual Sorting: How Parental Cognition and Residential Mobility Produce Unequal Environments for Children.

Highly skilled parents deploy distinct strategies to cultivate their children's development, but little is known about how parental cognitive skills interact with metropolitan opportunity structures and residential mobility to shape a major domain of inequality in children's lives: the neighborhood. We integrate multiple literatures to develop hypotheses on parental skill-based sorting by neighborhood socioeconomic status and public school test scores, which we test using an original follow-up of the Los Angeles Family and Neighborhood Survey. These data include more than a decade's worth of residential histories for households with children that are linked to census, geographic information system, and educational administrative data. We construct discrete-choice models of neighborhood selection that account for heterogeneity among household types, incorporate the unique spatial structure of Los Angeles County, and include a wide range of neighborhood factors. The results show that parents' cognitive skills interact with neighborhood socioeconomic status to predict residential selection after accounting for, and confirming, the expected influences of race, income, education, housing market conditions, and spatial proximity. Among parents in the upper/upper-middle class, cognitive skills predict sorting on average public school test scores rather than neighborhood socioeconomic status. Overall, we reveal skill-based contextual sorting as an overlooked driver of urban stratification.

Building towards an adolescent neural urbanome: Expanding environmental measures using linked external data (LED) in the ABCD study.

Many recent studies have demonstrated that environmental contexts, both social and physical, have an important impact on child and adolescent neural and behavioral development. The adoption of geospatial methods, such as in the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study, has facilitated the exploration of many environmental contexts surrounding participants' residential locations without creating additional burdens for research participants (i.e., youth and families) in neuroscience studies. However, as the number of linked databases increases, developing a framework that considers the various domains related to child and adolescent environments external to their home becomes crucial. Such a framework needs to identify structural contextual factors that may yield inequalities in children's built and natural environments; these differences may, in turn, result in downstream negative effects on children from historically minoritized groups. In this paper, we develop such a framework - which we describe as the "adolescent neural urbanome" - and use it to categorize newly geocoded information incorporated into the ABCD Study by the Linked External Data (LED) Environment & Policy Working Group. We also highlight important relationships between the linked measures and describe possible applications of the Adolescent Neural Urbanome. Finally, we provide a number of recommendations and considerations regarding the responsible use and communication of these data, highlighting the potential harm to historically minoritized groups through their misuse.

Parental Depression and Contextual Selection: The Case of School Choice.

Parental depression constricts children's development, but the mechanisms implicated-beyond daily parenting tactics-remain unknown. Today, parents must evaluate and select environmental contexts for child-rearing within increasingly complex residential and educational markets. Depression may hamper parents' abilities to navigate this terrain, constraining information collection and impairing child-oriented decision-making. In turn, depressed parents' children may lack access to developmentally enriching neighborhood, school, and child care settings. K-12 school sorting offers a strategic case to assess these expectations, given proliferating nontraditional options and school quality data. Analyses using the Los Angeles Family and Neighborhood Survey (N = 2,754) linked to administrative data suggest that depressed parents' children attend magnet, charter, or private schools at lower rates than similarly situated children of nondepressed parents; depression-based disparities appear largest among Latino and Black families. The study motivates future research examining whether the depression-contextual selection link mediates intergenerational processes and exacerbates segregation.

Adolescent Neurodevelopmental Variance Across Social Strata.

This cohort study explores variability in neurodevelopment across sociodemographic factors among youths.

WEALTH INEQUALITY AND ACCUMULATION.

Research on wealth inequality and accumulation and the data upon which it relies have expanded substantially in the twenty-first century. While the field has experienced rapid growth, conceptual and methodological challenges remain. We begin by discussing two major unresolved methodological concerns facing wealth research: how to address challenges to causal inference posed by wealth's cumulative nature and how to operationalize net worth, given its highly skewed nature. To underscore the need for continued empirical attention to net worth, we review trends in wealth levels and inequality and evaluate wealth's distinctiveness as an indicator of social stratification. Next, we provide an overview of data sources available for wealth research. We then review recent empirical evidence on the effects of wealth on other social outcomes, as well as research on the determinants of wealth. We close with a list of promising avenues for future research on wealth, its causes, and its consequences.