Measuring social-emotional development in schoolchildren: A national-level analysis of ECLS-B cohort data.

The present study examined the social-emotional development items assessed by kindergarten teachers in the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Birth Cohort to determine the optimal factor structure underlying the items as well as the reliability and validity of the resulting factors. This study identified an empirically derived factor structure for teacher-reported social development, investigated whether there was evidence of bias in teacher assessments of social-emotional constructs, examined factor invariance across demographic characteristics (i.e., race and ethnicity, sex, and poverty status), and examined the external validity of the derived factors by determining the extent to which they were associated with well-established measures of early childhood competencies. Findings suggested a 4-factor solution was optimal, consisting of (a) Interpersonal Skills, (b) Externalizing Behavior, (c) Approaches to Learning, and (d) Perspective Taking. Findings offer suggestive evidence of teacher biases in assessments and some, although not conclusive, support for the invariance of social-emotional dimension across demographic characteristics. Results provide a useful next step toward documenting reliable and valid social-emotional measures for use in early childhood research and challenges users of national datasets to think critically about the use of "scales" without a priori attention to important psychometric properties.

Noncustodial parents, instrumental networks, and child support compliance.

Research on child support compliance has focused on the characteristics of noncustodial parents (NCPs) that are associated with compliance, finding that compliance with child support orders is primarily related to the ability to pay support as demonstrated by earnings. Yet, there is evidence linking social support networks to both earnings and noncustodial parents' relationships with children. Using a social poverty framework, we show that relatively few NCPs are completely isolated: most have at least some people in their network who can loan money, provide a place to stay, or provide a ride. We explore whether the size of these instrumental support networks is positively linked to child support compliance both directly and indirectly through earnings. We find evidence of a direct association between instrumental support network size and child support compliance, but no evidence of an indirect association via increased earnings. These findings suggest the importance for researchers and child support practitioners to consider the contextual and relational factors of the social networks in which parents are embedded, and to more thoroughly examine the process by which support from one's network can lead to child support compliance.

Maternal satisfaction with joint and sole child physical placement arrangements following separation in Wisconsin and Finland.

Families (and sometimes courts) make important decisions regarding child physical custody arrangements post-separation, and shared parenting arrangements are increasingly common in most developed countries. Shared arrangements may be differentially associated with parental satisfaction, and these associations may vary across countries. Using data from surveys of separated mothers in Wisconsin and Finland, the present study explores this possibility and is guided by three aims: (a) to identify child and family characteristics associated with sole and shared child placements 6 or more years after separation; (b) to estimate associations of children's post-separation placements with maternal satisfaction with placements and expense sharing; (c) to examine whether the relationship between post-separation placement and maternal satisfaction varies by mothers' earnings and the quality of parents' relationships. We find that Finnish mothers with shared placement are more satisfied with their placement than are their counterparts with sole placement, while we find the inverse is true for Wisconsin mothers. Moreover, parental satisfaction with shared placement, overall and relative to sole placement, varies greatly depending on the quality of a mother's relationship with the other parent; and differences in relationship quality in Wisconsin and Finland may help explain the difference in satisfaction with shared placement in the two locations. In both Finland and Wisconsin, we find mothers with shared placement are more satisfied with the way expenses are shared between parents than are mothers with sole placement. Associations between placement and satisfaction are robust to extensive controls for child and maternal characteristics.