Nikulina, V., Widom, C. S., & Czaja, S. (2011). The role of childhood neglect and childhood poverty in predicting mental health, academic achievement and crime in adulthood. American Journal of Community Psychology, 48(3-4), 309-21.
Neglect, family poverty, community poverty, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), major depressive disorder (MDD), low academic achievement, and involvement in the criminal justice system are all factors that could contribute to poor quality of life. These factors may occur in isolation, but for some people, these factors intersect and become symbiotic, making it difficult to isolate correlations, interaction mechanisms, and by extension, possible interventions. This quantitative study, based on an ecological model, aims at understanding how neglect in early childhood is influenced by family and community poverty, and if this in turn can predict future PTSD, MDD, low academic achievement, and crime in adulthood.
This study is part of a larger longitudinal project where maltreated children were matched with non-maltreated children and followed prospectively into adulthood. Only substantiated cases of child maltreatment in court between 1967 and 1971 were included for this study, which yielded a sample of 1575 children. Among these children, 1307 (83%) were later located and interviewed between 1989 and 1995.
In order to examine the effect of neighborhood poverty on child mental health, academic achievement and crime outcomes, hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) was used to account for the nested structure in the data (i.e., child nested within neighborhood). The results from HLM showed that neglect in childhood was associated with higher likelihood of PTSD (OR = 1.68), perpetration of criminal offences as adults (OR = 1.73), and lower academic achievement (b = -.39) than the control group, after considering the effects of family and community poverty in the same model. This study also showed that, in general, childhood neglect, family and neighborhood poverty all could contribute to poor life outcomes for adults. Therefore, the authors suggested that development of interventions should consider the importance of the ecological context on child development for neglected children.
This study has several strengths: large sample size, stringent matching to establish a control group, and a longitudinal cohort design. Limitations include lack of generalizability due to cohort effects and possible skewed findings due to the general underreporting of neglect cases.