Child Development Supplement

Study Components

	Original CDS			Ongoing CDS
	1997 (CDS-I)	2002 (CDS-II)	2007 (CDS-III)	2014	2019 (Not yet released)
Survey Interviews
Primary Caregiver (PCG) Household	X	X	X	X
PCG-Child	X	X	X	X
Child	X	X	X	X
Secondary Caregiver	X	X	X
Absent Father	X
Teacher	X
School Administrator	X
Child Demographic File				X
Woodcock-Johnson Cognitive Achievement Assessment
Primary Caregiver	X
Child	X	X	X	X
Time Diary	X	X	X	X
Genomic data
Primary Caregiver				X
Child				X
Other adults in family

Questionare Content

Primary Caregiver Household Interview

The PCG Household (PCG-HH) Interview focuses on the characteristics of a child’s family, household, and neighborhood. The interview also collects extensive information on the PCG’s own psychological resources, social support, parenting stress, parenting style, and childrearing values. Unless otherwise noted, items in the PCG-HH interview were administered to all PCGs.

Topics included in the PCG-HH Interview are described below. The measurement resource table in Appendix A documents the source and original author of questionnaire content where appropriate. Note that PCG-HH Interview content begins with Section J (Neighborhood Measurements). Sections A–H appear in the PCG-Child interview.

Neighborhood Measurements (Section J). Eight items assess the PCG’s perception of neighborhood quality, including residential stability, residential satisfaction, neighborhood anonymity, social cohesion, and neighborhood safety. The series appears in the questionnaire as Items J1 to J8.

Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale for Primary Caregivers (Section K). The Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale describes the degree of approval or disapproval toward oneself.<ref>Rosenberg, M.(1986).The scale is widely used, with substantial documentation on its validity and reliability. PCGs reported on a series of 10 items using a response scale ranging from 1 to 4, where 1 indicates “Strongly Disagree” and 4 indicates “Strongly Agree.” The series appears in the PCG-HH Instrument as Items K1 to K10. The scale score is computed as an average of responses to these ten items and is available for respondents who have valid values on at least eight items (H14SLFEST)

Childrearing Values (Section M). Respondents ranked the qualities or traits they consider most important to prepare a child for life from a set of five choices. Traits include obedience, popularity, autonomy, a strong work ethic, and altruism. The series appears in items M3A to M3D. These items appeared in the Detroit Area Study and the General Social Survey.

Aggravation in Parenting (Section M). The aggravation in parenting scale (M4–M10) measures parenting stress that may result from changes in employment, income, and other factors in the lives of PCGs. Items M4 to M7 address parenting in general. Items M8 to M10 focus on the PCG’s feelings about his/her children in CDS collectively. In CDS I-III, items M8 to M10 were asked during the PCG-Child interview about each child separately. To reduce burden on caregivers in large families, these items were moved to the PCG-HH interview and asked only once in CDS-2014. The generated variable H14PARENT is a mean score derived from the seven items in the scale. A mean score was computed for all cases with valid values on at least five items.

Work/Life Adjustments for Children (Section M). In Items M11 to M13, PCGs reported whether they ever changed neighborhoods or employment conditions to improve circumstances for their children.

Attitudes about Gender Roles (Section M). Items M14 to M25 measure the PCG’s level of agreement with nine statements pertaining to gender role attitudes and three statements drawn from the “Being a Father” Scale. Four items measuring gender role attitudes and four items from the “Being a Father” Scale that were included in CDS I-III were excluded from CDS-2014. The choice of items to retain was guided by factor analysis using data from CDS-II and CDS-III. Variables with the highest factor loadings on the constructs of traditional marriage values, traditional mothering values, equity, and father involvement were retained. Each construct is represented by three variables.

Caregiver Psychological Distress (Section N). The Kessler 6 (K-6) Non-Specific Psychological Distress Scale (N1–N6) was designed to discriminate cases of serious mental illness from non-cases in a general population survey. The K-6 is administered to respondents in the PSID Core interview and is also included in the National Health Interview Survey and the National Household Survey on Drug Abuse, as well as in Core PSID.

The K-6 includes six items about how the respondent felt during the prior four weeks. Response items are based on a scale from 1 to 5, where 1 indicates “all of the time” and 5 indicates “none of the time.” Individual items may be rescored to range from 0 to 4 and then summed to calculate a total score that is comparable to other studies. A summed score of 13 or higher indicates a potential for nonspecific distress. The generated variable H14k6_14 is a sum score computed for all cases with valid responses to all six items in the scale.

The scale includes three follow-up items about persistence and impairment associated with symptoms of nonspecific distress (N7–N9).These items are administered to respondents who endorse any of the items in the K-6 series. Responses to these additional items are not required in order to score the K-6.

Family Pets (Section P). Section P includes seven questions about the number and types of pets in families and the PCG’s interaction with and attitudes about his or her pets. These items are new to CDS-2014. The source of the items is the CENSHARE Pet Attachment Scale. See the measurement resource table in Appendix A for details.

Disagreement in Parenting and Joint Goals (Section Q). The Parental Disagreement Scale measures the extent of agreement on daily activities between a PCG and his or her spouse or partner (Q1–Q5). The items were administered only to PCGs who had a spouse or cohabiting partner in the household. The generated variable H14DISAGR is a mean score derived from the five items in the scale for all cases with valid values on at least four items. Three items measure the extent to which the PCG and his or her spouse or partner have joint goals for the future (Q6–Q8). Five items measure methods of conflict resolution among family members (Q9–Q13).

Food Security (Section R). The PCG-HH interview included an 18-item version of the U.S. Household Food Security Survey Module developed by the Economic Research Service at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (R1–R15). The module includes questions about various levels of food security such as worries about having enough food and enough healthy food, cutting back to conserve food, and running out of money for food. The module collects information about household (R1–R8) and child (R9–R15) food security separately. These data allow the food security status of CDS-2014 families to be defined along a continuum extending from high food security to low food security. Generated variables associated with this series include raw scores summing the number of endorsed items pertaining to the household overall (H14HHFOODR) and separately for adults (H14ADFOODR) and children (H14CHFOODR). A parallel set of items describes the food insecurity status of the household overall (H14HHFOOD) and of adults (H14ADFOOD) and children (H14CHFOOD) in the household. A raw sum score (H14FOOD6R) and a food insecurity status indicator (H14FOOD6) based on a six-item subset of questionnaire items (R2–R6) are also available.

An instrument programming error present at the beginning of data collection caused some eligible respondents to be skipped out of a more detailed set of questions about household and child food insecurity. Both the household and child sections of the food security module include a first stage screener composed of three items. As designed, a respondent who endorses any item at the first stage as “often true” or “sometimes true” should advance to the second stage of the module. However the instrument programming error caused respondents to advance to the second stage only when they endorsed at least two of the three items (R1–R3 for household food security and R9–R11 for child food security). This error was corrected during the seventh week of fieldwork.

Of 256 PCGs who endorsed exactly 1 item in the R1–R3 series and who should have advanced to R4–R7, 98 did not advance. Those who did advance (i.e., who were interviewed after the programming error was corrected) reported more extreme food insecurity much less often compared to respondents who endorsed two or three items in the R1–R3 series.

Of 315 PCGSs who endorsed exactly 1 item in the R9–R11 series and who should have advanced to R12–R15, 116 did not advance. Those who did advance reported relatively low levels of heightened food insecurity in R12–R15.

Home Environment (Section S). The Home Environment section collects information about children’s access to learning resources and technology in the home, the PCG’s involvement in her or his children’s school and learning at home, and the PCG’s own school enrollment, employment circumstances, and religiosity.

Children’s Access to Technology.Content on children’s access to and use of technology at home was significantly expanded for CDS-2014 to accommodate the emergence of new technologies and applications since 2007. Topics in the PCG-HH include the types and number of electronic devices in the home, including televisions, computers, tablets, and cellular telephones (S1–S8 and S14A–S14D); shared television viewing habits (S9–S10); and household rules about television viewing (S11–S13) and use of other electronic devices (S14G–S14L). This section also includes an adapted 6-item web-use skills index originally developed by Hargittai and Hsieh to measure the PCG’s familiarity with computer and internet-related terminology (S14N1–S14N6).

Home Observation for Measurement of the Environment (HOME Scale). The HOME Scale measures characteristics of a child’s home environment that are associated with cognitive development and emotional support. , HOME Scale content in the PCG-HH interview includes questions about how often the family engages in specific activities together, including meals (M1), socializing (M2), and television viewing (S9–S10); the number of books in the home (including electronic books, S15–S16); and the number of books the PCG has read in the last year (S17–S18).

Questions about whether the family receives a daily newspaper or carries a subscription to any magazine that were included in previous rounds of CDS were excluded from CDS-2014 because of the rapid and uneven decline in the availability of printed periodicals in regional markets during the last decade.

The complete contents of the HOME Scale and the location of individual items are described in Appendix A.

School Involvement. Two items in the PCG-HH interview address the PCG’s volunteer activities at his or her child(ren)’s school (S19–S20). These items were included in the PCG-Child interview in CDS I-III, but question wording was revised in 2014 to solicit responses about activities at any child’s school, rather than at each child’ school. Six other items addressing the PCG’s school involvement are included in the PCG-Child interview.

Response to Poor Grades. Twelve items ask PCGs about actions they would expect to take in response to a child’s poor grades (S21–S30B). These items were included in the PCG-Child interview in CDS I-III, but question wording was revised in 2014 to solicit responses about expected actions in response to any child’s poor grades, rather than about each child’s grades.

Own Schooling. PCGs report whether they are currently attending school, and if so, the number of hours they attend school each week and travel time (S31–S31B).

Employment Characteristics. PCGs report whether they are currently working, and if so, report on characteristics of their employment such as number of jobs, hours worked weekly, nonstandard work schedules, and commuting time.

Religiosity. PCGs reported how often they attended religious services in the past year (S39–S40) and on the importance of religion and spirituality in their lives (S41–S42).

Woodcock-Johnson Revised Test of Achievement - Passage Comprehension. In families that were randomly selected for the in-person supplemental interview, interviewers administered the Passage Comprehension subtest from the Woodcock-Johnson Revised Tests of Achievement (WJR), Form B to PCGs. The Spanish version of the WJ-R (Batería-R, Form A) was used for PCGs whose first language was Spanish and who elected to complete the assessment in that language.

The Passage Comprehension subtest measures understanding of written text. Respondents read a sentence or brief paragraph and provide the word that is missing from the passage. Indicators of whether a correct response was offered to each item are available. In addition, generated variables associated with the PCG passage comprehension assessment include a total raw score (H14PCRAW), a standardized score (H14PCSS), a percentile score (H14PCPR), and a W score (H14PCW). For more information, see the PSID Technical Report entitled “Achievement Tests in the Panel Study of Income Dynamics Child Development Supplement,” available at [1].

Interviewer Observations (Section OB). Interviewers provided structured and open-ended observations on the interviews they conducted, on the respondents, and on the respondents’ household environment.

Post-Woodcock-Johnson Assessment Observations. Interviewers recorded whether others were present during the administration of the WJ-R Passage Comprehension assessment and whether anything out of the ordinary occurred that might have affected the respondent’s performance (ASOB1–ASOB5).

Post-Interview Observations (Telephone). Interviewers recorded their assessment of the respondent’s verbal fluency, comprehension, and self-expression at the conclusion of the PCG telephone interview (PCGOB1–PCGOB5).

Post-Interview Observations (Household). Where families were randomly selected for the in-person supplemental interview, interviewers reported their observations about the physical appearance and quality of the dwelling and the neighborhood (PCGOB6–PCGOB19).