Measuring the combined risk to young children's cognitive development: An alternative to cumulative indices

摘要

In studies of child development, the combined effect of multiple risks acting in unisonhas been represented in a variety of ways. This investigation builds upon this precedingwork and presents a new procedure for capturing the combined effect of multiple risks.A representative sample of 2,899 British children had their cognitive developmentmeasured at 36 and 58 months of age along with 10 potential risks during this period ofdevelopment. Comparing a cumulative index of these risks against the previouslyundocumented alternative of confirmatory factor analysis using formative measure-ment, this study found differences favouring the factor analysis. The factor analysisprocedure demonstrated greater predictive power of children's cognitive developmentwhile it systematically tested two of the assumptions implicit in cumulative risk indices.