Date of Award

2025

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science in Human Development and Family Science

Department

Human Development and Family Science

First Advisor

Sammy Ahmed

Abstract

The impact of a child's socioeconomic status (SES) impacts all aspects of development. Children’s SES will be examined to determine the potential impact they may have on children's academics and behavior. The SES variables that will be examined are parent education, parent occupation, and household income. Parent education is one of the strongest predictors of child school achievement (Martinez et al., 2022). Children who come from a lower SES household are more likely to display externalizing behaviors (Barry et al., 2022). This study in particular looks at its impact for academic achievement in reading, math, and science and external problem behaviors. This study used the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Early Childhood Kindergarten Class of 2010-11 (ECLS-K:2011;Tourangeau et al., 2019). Participants included 18,174 elementary school children who were evaluated from kindergarten through fifth grade. Path analyses were run to examine the relationship between socioeconomic status in relation to their influence on children's academic achievement and external problem behavior. This study found that parent education and household income had a significant and positive effect on academics, parent occupation had a positive and significant relationship for reading and science achievements, and household income predicted externalizing problem behavior. These findings show the impacts of socioeconomics status on children's academic achievements and external behaviors.

Included in

Psychology Commons

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