Lloyd Jennifer E V, Hertzman Clyde
Human Early Learning Partnership, University of British Columbia, Suite 440, 2206 East Mall, Vancouver, BC, Canada V6T 1Z3.
Soc Sci Med. 2009 Jan;68(1):111-23. doi: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2008.09.063. Epub 2008 Nov 3.
Early child development (ECD)--the development of physical, social-emotional, and language-cognitive capacities in the early years--is a foundation of health, well-being, learning, and behaviour across the life course. Consequently, the capacity to monitor ECD is an important facet of a modern society. This capacity is achieved by having in place an ongoing flow of high-quality information on the state of early child development, its determinants, and long-term developmental outcomes. Accordingly, there remains a considerable need for research that merges community-centred, longitudinal, and linked-data approaches to monitoring child development. The current paper addresses this need by introducing one method of summarising and quantifying the developmental trajectories of British Columbian children at the neighbourhood- or district-level: computing the Community Index of Child Development (CICD) for each geographic area. A simple index that describes change in children's developmental trajectories at the aggregate level, the CICD is computable because of our capacity to conduct individual-level linkage of two population data sets: the Early Development Instrument (EDI), a holistic measure of children's readiness for school which is administered at Kindergarten, and the British Columbia Ministry of Education's Foundation Skills Assessment (FSA), a Grade 4 measure of academic skills. In this paper, we demonstrate: (a) wide variation in the CICDs according to the children's district of residence in Kindergarten; (b) an association of the CICDs with an indicator of the socioeconomic character of the neighbourhoods; and (c) contrasting patterns of neighbourhood convergence and divergence in two different school districts--such that, in some areas, children from high vulnerability neighbourhoods tend to catch up between Kindergarten and Grade 4 whereas, in other areas, they tend to fall further behind.
幼儿发展（ECD）——早年身体、社会情感和语言认知能力的发展——是贯穿一生的健康、幸福、学习和行为的基础。因此，监测幼儿发展的能力是现代社会的一个重要方面。这种能力是通过持续提供有关幼儿发展状况、其决定因素和长期发展成果的高质量信息来实现的。因此，仍然非常需要将以社区为中心、纵向和关联数据方法相结合来监测儿童发展的研究。本文通过介绍一种在邻里或地区层面总结和量化不列颠哥伦比亚省儿童发展轨迹的方法来满足这一需求：计算每个地理区域的儿童发展社区指数（CICD）。CICD是一个简单的指数，用于描述总体层面儿童发展轨迹的变化，由于我们能够对两个人口数据集进行个体层面的关联，所以它是可计算的：早期发展工具（EDI），这是一种在幼儿园阶段对儿童入学准备情况的综合衡量指标，以及不列颠哥伦比亚省教育部的基础技能评估（FSA），这是一项对四年级学术技能的衡量指标。在本文中，我们证明了：（a）根据儿童幼儿园所在地区的不同，CICD存在很大差异；（b）CICD与邻里社会经济特征指标之间存在关联；（c）两个不同学区的邻里趋同和趋异模式形成对比——也就是说，在某些地区，来自高脆弱性邻里的儿童在幼儿园到四年级之间往往会追赶上来，而在其他地区，他们往往会进一步落后。
