VEST and Hunter Student Research Conference Speaker: Rebekah Coley

How Poverty Shapes Children’s Structural and Social Environments: An Integrative Conceptual Framework and Review

  • - EDT
  • Holloway Hall, Bavaro 116

Abstract

Poverty is a notable feature of societies around the world. Poverty constrains children’s development and life opportunities, impacts which largely run through environmental forces. As such, it is essential to understand the contexts of poverty. In this integrative review, Dr. Coley presents a conceptual framework of the contextual forces imposed by poverty in children’s key proximal environments – their homes, neighborhoods, and schools – delineating both structural and social features in each environment. This framework is illustrated by exemplar empirical findings, highlighting poverty-related disparities in home structural contexts (e.g., physical disorder, air quality, affordability, reliability, enrichment); home social contexts (e.g., stimulation and support, parental mental health, stress, corporal punishment, parenting values); neighborhood structural contexts (e.g., pollution, crowding, physical disorder, resources, green space); neighborhood social contexts (e.g., concentrated disadvantage, crime, child maltreatment, collective efficacy); school structural contexts (access, space and materials, teacher qualifications, disadvantaged peers); and school social contexts (instructional quality, parent-school connections, school climate, school discipline). Within this literature, Dr. Coley identifies important gaps, suggests future directions, and delineates implications for practice and policy. This review emphasizes the multifaceted and complex nature of poverty and underscores cultural and regional variation in the environments of poverty. Beyond this variability and ongoing questions concerning underlying causal processes, evidence richly documents how children in poverty experience, on average, fewer supportive structural and social resources and greater structural and social barriers to healthy development than their advantaged peers. Together this evidence helps scholars, practitioners, and policymakers to understand the breadth and complexity of disparities associated with poverty.

Speaker Bio

Rebekah Coley VEST Speaker 2025-03-28 Photo

Rebekah Levine Coley, Ph.D. is Professor and Florencia and Marc Gabelli Family Faculty Fellow of Counseling, Developmental, and Educational Psychology and Director of the Institute of Early Childhood Policy at Boston College. She received her doctorate in Developmental Psychology from the University of Michigan and postdoctoral training in Demography and Public Policy at the University of Chicago.

Professor Coley’s expertise lies in assessing and counteracting economic, social, and racial inequities in mental and behavioral health and educational and economic attainment. Her research employs quantitative, qualitative, and evaluation methodologies to assess and inform social and educational policies and practices at the federal, state, and local level which seek to disrupt the transmission of inequities to children, families, and communities. Professor Coley’s research has been published in dozens of leading journals and edited volumes, and has received funding from the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the Australian Research Council, and numerous private foundations. She was the founding Editor of the Child Evidence Brief series published by the Society for Research in Child Development which translates developmental science to federal and state policy makers, and has held leadership positions in the Society for Research in Child Development, the Society for Research on Adolescence, the Child Care and Early Education Policy Research Consortium, and the University-based Child and Family Policy Consortium. Her research excellence has been recognized through receipt of a Fulbright Senior Scholar Award, a Social Policy Award from the Society for Research in Adolescence, and the inaugural Mavis Hetherington Award in Applied Developmental Science from the American Psychological Association.

Event Information

Event Sponsor

  • Virginia Education Science Training (VEST) Fellowship Program