Title: Intimate Partner Violence and Children's Human Capital: The Development of Socio-Emotional and Cognitive Skills in Early Years
Funder: Economic and Social Research Council

Abstract: The current project aims to generate new knowledge of how exposure to intimate partner violence (IPV) affects the accumulation of socio-emotional and cognitive skills of young children, accounting for both dynamic effects and relationships between skills, and also the relationship to mother-child interactions and maternal health. We will achieve this aim by combining of an existing internationally unique UK longitudinal cohort data resource - the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC) - with a set of rapidly developing econometric methods for dynamic human capital modelling. The ALSPAC data that will be used was collected in the early-to-mid 1990s and is plausibly the best suited data resource in the world for studying the dynamics of and interactions in the relationship between children's exposure to IPV and their socio-emotional and cognitive development in a large general population, uniquely containing high frequency measures of child development and repeated information on the incidence of IPV towards the mothers. However, systematically exploiting the full richness of data requires methods that have only been - and continue to be - developed in economics. These new methods estimate dynamic human capital production functions whilst treating skills and inputs as imperfectly observed (or "latent") but reflected in multiple noisy measures. By applying and extending these methods, we will be able to uncover how children's skills develop dynamically over multiple stages of childhood, from birth to age seven, accounting for dynamic complementarities in this process, as well as for the noisiness of the numerous measures available in the data. An existing literature in pediatrics and psychology has shown that IPV can have important impacts on children both directly through the witnessing of abuse, and indirectly by affecting mother-child interactions. Perhaps the most important limitation in existing work relates to fully understanding the significance of dynamic complementarities, which is central for a fuller grasp of potential avenues for policy intervention. For instance, how supporting mothers affected by IPV can mitigate direct negative impacts on the child's socio-emotional skills which in turn can benefit their future cognitive skills. The proposed research offers a novel approach to overcome this deficiency by making use of high-powered methods developed to estimate dynamic human capital production functions. The specific questions that the project will address thus include: - How large are the direct effects of IPV exposure on children's development of cognitive and socio-emotional skills? - What role is played by dynamic complementarities across skills and inputs? - What indirect effects are generated through changes in mother-child interactions? Our project will hence strongly complement efforts in other disciplines and will add IPV as a key input factor in relation to the literature in economics, and outputs from the project will target top academic journals. The research is very timely and relevant from a policy perspective, both from a UK and global perspective. For instance, the Domestic Abuse bill currently going through Parliament has been amended so that children affected by IPV will, for a first time, also be recognized as victims in their own right. A key objective of the current project is hence to also to target broader non-academic and user audiences. For this purpose of fully leveraging the project's impact potential, user engagement with key organizations, that engage with research to further their work to protect vulnerable children, is built into the project.

Lay abstract: A recent EU-wide report by the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights found that 22 percent of women had experienced Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) in their lifetime, and wide-cited estimates by the WHO suggest that the global incidence is significantly higher. The scale and impact of IPV, have attracted the attention from multiple academic disciplines that -- from different angles -- are trying to provide accurate evidence on this important and devastating phenomenon. Besides the indubitable and widely documented adverse impact of IPV on women's physical and mental health, children exposed to IPV are also increasingly recognized as victims in their own right. The harm to children exposed to IPV may be both direct through the witnessing of abuse, or indirect by affecting the mother-child interactions. Growing up in a family where the mother is abused by her partner might represent a grave shock for the child, potentially hindering the development of their human capital. This project will provide evidence on the impact of children's exposure to IPV on their cognitive and socio-emotional development between birth and age seven, and on the role of mother's responses to abuse. To this purpose, this project will implement and further develop a methodology recently introduced in economics to study the technology of human capital formation. The focus will be on the dynamics of the accumulation of skills, studying how skills co-evolve, and the role of mother-child interactions in this process. Most importantly, in relation to this highly successful recent literature, we will incorporate, for the first, time IPV as a negative input. The strength of this method will be fully exploited by using an exceptionally rich source of data -internationally unique in containing all the necessary information for this analysis of a large representative population. The Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC) is a UK cohort study that includes (i) annual indicators of the incidence of IPV; (ii) high-frequency and reliable measures of children's cognitive and socio-emotional skills; (iii) extremely detailed set of information on mother-child interactions as well as mother's mental health. Specifically, the project will address three research questions that will further the understanding of how children's development is hampered by exposure to IPV. First, how large are the direct effects of children's exposure to IPV on their development of cognitive and socio-emotional skills? This in effects casts exposure to IPV as a form of harmful maltreatment. Second, what are the indirect effects generated by change in mother-child interactions as a response to IPV? Such interactions can potentially amplify or compensate for the negative impact of IPV on children witnessing IPV. Third, what interactions between skills, and between skills and mother-child interactions, shape the dynamic effects of IPV on children's development of socioemotional and cognitive skills over their early life years? Such interactions are crucial for suggesting the optimal nature and timing of policy interventions. The current project will hence contribute to a highly influential and rapidly growing economic literature studying the importance of early childhood conditions for development and will allow new important insights to be gained by fully exploiting the richness of an existing unique data resource. In developing this analysis, our project will draw on, and contribute, to a research that spans multiple disciplines including sociology, psychology, pediatrics and criminology. The findings of this project respond to the need of thoroughly documenting and further studying the damaging effect of IPV within the family with the purpose of suggesting effective policy recommendations to alleviate its effect.

Research activity codes: 2.3 PSYCHOLOGICAL, SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC FACTORS
Health categories: MENTAL HEALTH