Social
Leveraging Epidemiologic Mixture Methods to Understand Early Child Development Through a Socio-Ecological Lens Amanda Dorsey* Amanda Dorsey Dorsey Dorsey Emory University Department of Epidemiology
Background: Exposures at the individual, interpersonal, and neighborhood levels have been individually shown to affect child development. We examined which levels of modifiable exposures are most impactful for three-year old child development, using two types of mixture models.
Methods: We used Future of Families and Child Wellbeing Study data, a longitudinal birth cohort from 18 large U.S. cities. Two mixture models, self-organizing maps (SOM) and quantile g-computation, included individual resource (income, material hardship, educational toys), interpersonal (aggravation in parenting, mother-child activities), and neighborhood (collective efficacy) exposure scales. Development outcomes at age 3 were measured with the Adaptive Social Behavior Inventory, Child Behavior Checklist, and Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test. Covariates included maternal race and ethnicity and child sex.
Results: Among 1,552 families, three SOM clusters were identified. Cluster 1 was most privileged across all exposures; cluster 2 had the lowest interpersonal exposure scores but moderate privilege regarding neighborhood collective efficacy and educational toys; cluster 3 had the lowest neighborhood exposure scores but moderate privilege regarding material hardship and aggravation in parenting. Compared to cluster 1, mean developmental scores in clusters 2 and 3 were 0.22-0.63 standard deviations lower across developmental domains. Clusters 2 and 3 experienced marginally smaller differences in social and behavioral scores, respectively. Adjusted quantile g-computation further showed that improving all exposures by one quantile was associated with 0.21 (95% CI: 0.09, 0.33; social domain) to 0.59 (95% CI: 0.47, 0.71; behavioral domain) SD higher child development scores.
Conclusion: Greater privilege across these exposures was collectively associated with improved child development, particularly behavioral. These results support multi-level interventions for well-rounded child development.