In the last half decade, America has expanded educational opportunities and experimented with a variety of educational reforms in an effort to reduce educational inequality. The first part of this dissertation examines the effectiveness of two major education policies aim to reduce educational inequality. Chapter 1 examines whether the expansion...
Loneliness, Stress, and Depression over the Transition to Adulthood: Interpersonal and Physiological Pathways Leah Darrah Doane During the transition into adulthood, youth experience substantial stressful changes as they navigate shifts in their interpersonal, familial, educational and economic domains of life. This dissertation aims to understand how the unique experiences of...
Understanding how contexts shape child development is a primary goal of human development research and theory. Child effects, or the influence of children on their own environment, may be a key process by which contexts and children interact to shape subsequent development. Yet, child effects have been under-studied in social...
In three essays, this dissertation examined the associations between child characteristics, interparental discord and various aspects of child development and physiological functioning. In the first essay, using longitudinal, nationally representative data on infants and their families from the early childhood longitudinal study (ECLS-B), results revealed small, but significant associations between...
This dissertation presents the results of three studies examining the determinants and consequences of employment among single mothers with infants and toddlers. In the first study, I use nationally-representative survey data to identify the effect of age-of-youngest-child welfare-to-work exemptions on the employment of single mothers with no more than a...
Middle childhood is an important but often overlooked developmental period. Similarly, a large literature examines the importance of child care as a developmental context, focusing almost exclusively on pre-school child care experiences. Through three related empirical studies, this dissertation aims to address these two gaps in the extant literature. These...
Two-year colleges are a critical site for the expansion of educational opportunity in the United States. They enroll nearly half of all postsecondary students and are a gateway to higher education for low-income, non-traditional, racial and ethnic minority, and first-generation college students. Degree completion rates in the two-year sector are...