Comparative Research on Child Development in Low- and Middle-Income Countries. Comparative research can help determine which inputs for child development are universal. Patterns that emerge consistently in a variety of contexts suggest biological processes at work and highlight areas needed for universal interventions. My disparities research exploring socio-economic gradients in four lower- and middle-income countries confirms that early childhood is a sensitive period for development across varied contexts. I find that vocabulary and height differences between the upper and lower SES quartiles are established early and are generally constant through age 12 years, which emphasizes the need for early intervention among families in resource-deprived settings. More recently, I harmonized data from five Latin American countries and three survey rounds to measure wealth gradients in child development (vocabulary, cognition, and socio-emotional outcomes). Our work confirms the wealth gaps in vocabulary are largest and all wealth gaps found are generally persistent.
From this work, I developed a Stata program, stndzxage, a tool for comparative research on child development. Unlike growth outcomes, for example, there are not global standards for other realms of child development (e.g. cognition, motor, socio-emotional). Thus, to do comparative research, it is helpful to standardize scores, with the age of the child taken into account. My program provides a simple command for doing so, and also provides a variety of options such as if the test should be standardized continuously over age or discretely; some tests change questions at different months, so the discreet option is valuable. It also generates graphs of the raw scores in comparison to the standardized scores, so the user can easily assess if their standardization choices look appropriate.
Selected Papers
a. Attanasio, O, Lopez-Boo, F, & Reynolds, S. (2022) “Inequality in the early years in LAC: A comparative study of size, persistence, and policies.” Presentation at the conference of the Latin American and Caribbean Inequality Review. Cartagena, Colombia. (2023)
b. Reynolds, S, Andersen, C., Behrman, J., Singh, A., Stein, A. D., Benny, L., Crookston, B.T., Cueto, S., Dearden K., Georgiadis, A., Krutikova, S. & Fernald, L.C.H. (2017). Disparities in children’s vocabulary and height in relation to household wealth and parental schooling: A longitudinal study in four low-and middle-income countries. Social Science & Medicine Population Health, 3, 767-786. PMC5742640
c. Reynolds, S. user-written Stata program stndzxage. Available at http://fmwww.bc.edu/repec/bocode/s/stndzxage.ado