Family Research Consortium IV

Faculty
 

Vonnie C. McLoyd, Ph.D.

Research Scientist, Center for Developmental Science
Professor, Psychology
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
vcmcloyd@unc.edu

Dr. McLoyd has a longstanding interest in economic transitions, families, and mental health and development. She recently completed a project with Sandra Hofferth and colleagues examining the achievement and behavior of children of welfare recipients, welfare leavers, and low-income single mothers in the Child Supplement of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. In addition to examining differences among these three groups of children, they assessed the role of parenting behavior and family relations in mediating group differences.

For the past 5 years, she has been working with an interdisciplinary group of researchers examining the short- and long-term effects on child and family functioning of the New Hope project, a 3-year demonstration experiment designed to test the effectiveness of an employment-based antipoverty program. Data collected 24 months after random assignment indicated that New Hope had strong positive effects on boys' academic achievement, classroom behavior skills, positive social behavior, and problem behaviors as reported by teachers, and on boys' own expectations for advanced education and occupational aspirations. There were not corresponding program effects for girls.

She and her collaborators believe that positive child outcomes may have resulted because:

  1. Children in New Hope spent more time in formal child care programs and other structured activities than did children in control families.
  2. New Hope parents were employed more, had more material resources, reported more social support, and expressed less stress and more optimism about achieving their goals than did parents in the control sample.
They are now analyzing 60-month follow-up data to determine if positive effects among boys persisted and if any program effects for girls emerged, and plan to collect 96-month follow-up data. McLoyd also has an ongoing project on multi-level influences on parent disciplinary practices that will provide fellows opportunities to study cultural processes in relation to child socialization, parent-child relations, and child development.


UCLA Center for Culture & Health, 760 Westwood Plaza, Box 62, Los Angeles, CA 90024