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The Chicago Longitudinal Study investigates the educational and social development of a same-age cohort of 1,539 low-income, minority children (93 percent African American) who grew up in high-poverty neighborhoods in central-city Chicago and attended government-funded kindergarten programs in the Chicago Public Schools in 1985-1986. Children were at risk of poor outcomes because they face social-environmental disadvantages including neighborhood poverty, family low-income status, and other economic and educational hardships.

Study Goals

The CLS is guided by four major goals:

1. To document patterns of school performance and social competence throughout the school-age years, including their school achievement and attitudes, academic progress, and psychosocial development.
2. To evaluate the effects of the Child-Parent Center and Expansion Program on child and youth development. Children and families had the opportunity to participate in this unique Head Start type early childhood intervention from ages three to nine (preschool to third grade).
3. To identify and better understand the educational and psychosocial pathways through which the effects of early childhood experiences are manifested, and more generally, through which scholastic and behavioral development proceeds.
4. To investigate the contributions to children's educational and social development of a variety of personal, family, school, and community factors, especially those that can be altered by program or policy interventions to prevent learning difficulties and promote positive outcomes.

Studies addressing the first two goals have been reported extensively. Participation in the Child-Parent Center Program for different lengths of time, for example, has been found to be significantly associated with higher levels of school achievement into adolescence, with higher levels of consumer skills, with enhanced parent involvement in children's education, and with lower rates of grade retention and special education, lower rates of early school dropout, and with lower rates of delinquent behavior (Reynolds, 1994, 1995, 2000; Reynolds and Temple, 1995, 1998; Temple, Reynolds, and Miedel, in press). Children's patterns of school and social adjustment over time (Reynolds and Bezruczko, 1993; Reynolds and Gill, 1994; Reynolds, 2000) as well as several methodological contributions (Reynolds and Temple, 1995; Reynolds, 1998a, 1998b) also have been reported elsewhere. Examples of studies addressing goals three and four are reported in a special issue of the Journal of School Psychology (Reynolds, 1999).

The Chicago Longitudinal Study is particularly appropriate for addressing these and other goals for two reasons. First, the CLS is one of the most extensive and comprehensive studies undertaken of a low-income, urban sample. Data were collected beginning during children's preschool years and have continued on a yearly basis throughout the school-age years. Multiple sources of data have been utilized in this on-going study, including teacher surveys, child surveys and interviews, parent surveys and interviews, school administrative records, standardized tests, and classroom observations. Thus, the impact of a variety of individual, family, and school-related factors can be investigated.

A second unique feature of the CLS is that although the project concerns child development, an emphasis is given to factors and experiences that are alterable by program or policy intervention both within and outside of schools. Besides information on early childhood intervention, information has been collected on classroom adjustment, parent involvement and parenting practices, grade retention and special education placement, school mobility, educational expectations of children, teachers, and parents, and on the school learning environment.

The Social Capital and Children's Development data were collected in a study of the causal effects of social capital on levels and inequalities of children's social and cognitive development during the early elementary years. The study included 52 schools in Phoenix and San Antonio, including 3,084 first graders and their families, and over 200 teachers, with half the schools randomly selected for the intervention and half serving as controls. Children from low-income Latino families were a special focus of the study. The experimental design of this study allowed for testing of the causal role of social capital. Social capital here refers to trust and shared expectations embedded in social networks of parents, teachers, and children. For young children, social capital operates primarily through their relationships with their parents, enhancing development through mechanisms of social support and social control.

The research design was experimental: social capital was manipulated through a well-tested randomized intervention, Families and Schools Together (FAST), that enhanced social capital among parents, teachers, and children through an intensive after-school program and a 2-year follow-up program. FAST is intended to reduce parental isolation, enhance family engagement with schools, and strengthen family functioning; that is, to increase social capital between families and schools, among families, and within families to improve children's education and life-long outcomes. Key aspects of child development were assessed, including (a) social skills and problem behavior from standardized behavioral ratings by parents and teachers, and (b) grade retention, attendance rates, and third-grade reading and mathematics scores from school records. Social capital was measured with repeated surveys of teachers and parents that address the extent of social networks, parent involvement, trust, and shared expectations among parents, between parents and schools, and between parents and children. Demographic variables of this study include native language, years in the United States, date of birth/age, race/ethnicity, gender, and household composition.