title: Connecting school-readiness, self-control, and deviant behavior
title: the role of non-academic readiness
titleType: Subtitle
Creators: name: Guinn, Kelly Marie
Publisher: name: University of Iowa
Year: 2022
Subjects: early childhood
item factor analysis
school-readiness
self-control
public abstract
Education

description: Social, emotional, and behavioral skillsets are important throughout the life-course. Criminologists have extensively studied how low self-control is associated with a variety of life-outcomes. Despite this extensive research, criminologists have overlooked a relevant area of research in sociology of education and educational psychology: school-readiness. School-readiness includes both academic readiness (i.e., cognitive) and non-academic readiness (i.e., social, emotional, and behavioral). Non-academic readiness is akin to criminological self-control; both concepts focus on an individual’s ability to maintain attention, empathize with others, control emotions, and regulate behavior. This dissertation explores the connections between school-readiness research and criminological self-control research.
description: In Chapter 2, I develop a measurement model for school-readiness using data from wave three of the United Kingdom’s Millennium Cohort Study. After reviewing the school-readiness literature, I identify six domains of school-readiness, and these include language knowledge, math knowledge, approach to learning, social competence, emotional competence, and behavior regulation. Results from item factor analysis demonstrate that school-readiness is divided into two latent factors: academic skills and non-academic skills. These two factors serve as the key dependent variables in Chapter 3.
description: In Chapter 3, I explore what early childhood factors are associated with school-readiness. The focus of this chapter is primarily on the family given that this is the child’s primary environment before age five. Using the first three waves of data from the United Kingdom’s Millennium Cohort Study, I examine how positive and negative family interactions are related to the child’s level of school-readiness skills. This study finds that reading, going to the library, and being visited by other young children are associated with higher levels of school-readiness. The association between negative family interactions—particularly aggressive discipline—and school-readiness is more complex. The findings reveal varying impacts of physically aggressive discipline and psychologically aggressive discipline on school-readiness. The analyses also reveal that child’s sex and parent’s education level are indirectly associated with school-readiness through these family interactions, which suggests that gaps in school-readiness skills across social groups could be due to differences in family interactions. Moreover, the analyses reveal that the effect of positive interactions on school-readiness is significantly greater than the effect of negative interactions on school-readiness. This is an optimistic finding because it is much easier to add enriching interactions to a child’s environment than it is to take away their adversity.
description: Finally, in Chapter 4, I examine the relationship between non-academic school-readiness, self-control (i.e., self-rated self-control and temptation resistance), and deviant behavior. The data are from the first three waves and the most recent wave of the United Kingdom’s Millennium Cohort Study. The analyses reveal a complex story. The higher-order factor of non-academic readiness is not significantly associated with self-control measures, but the lower-order components are associated when self-control measures once the higher-order factor is removed. Emotional competence and behavior regulation, both measured at age five, are significantly associated with self-reported levels of self-control and temptation resistance, both measured at age seventeen. However, these associations are in opposite directions: Emotional competence was negatively associated with criminological self-control and behavior regulation was positively associated with criminological self-control. These findings are similar to recent research in criminology that shows different developmental trajectories for individual components of self-control. Furthermore, self-control and temptation resistance both had a direct negative association with deviant behavior, and behavior regulation was indirectly associated with deviant behavior through self-control and temptation resistance. Therefore, non-academic readiness was, indeed, significantly associated with criminological self-control and deviant behavior. Future research should continue to explore these connections.