A meta‐analysis of the relationship between socioeconomic status and executive function performance among children |
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| Authors: | Gwendolyn M. Lawson Cayce J. Hook Martha J. Farah |
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| Affiliation: | 1. Department of Psychology, University of Pennsylvania, USAAuthor note: This research was supported by NIH grant HD055689. The research reported here was supported (in whole or in part) by the Institute of Education Sciences, US Department of Education, through Grant #R305B090015 to the University of Pennsylvania. The opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not represent the views of the Institute or the US Department of Education. The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions to improve the quality of the paper.;2. Department of Psychology, Stanford University, USA;3. Department of Psychology, University of Pennsylvania, USA |
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| Abstract: | The relationship between childhood socioeconomic status (SES) and executive function (EF) has recently attracted attention within psychology, following reports of substantial SES disparities in children's EF. Adding to the importance of this relationship, EF has been proposed as a mediator of socioeconomic disparities in lifelong achievement and health. However, evidence about the relationship between childhood SES and EF is mixed, and there has been no systematic attempt to evaluate this relationship across studies. This meta‐analysis systematically reviewed the literature for studies in which samples of children varying in SES were evaluated on EF, including studies with and without primary hypotheses about SES. The analysis included 8760 children between the ages of 2 and 18 gathered from 25 independent samples. Analyses showed a small but statistically significant correlation between SES and EF across all studies (rrandom = .16, 95% CI [.12, .21]) without correcting for attenuation owing to range restriction or measurement unreliability. Substantial heterogeneity was observed among studies, and a number of factors, including the amount of SES variability in the sample and the number of EF measures used, emerged as moderators. Using only the 15 studies with meaningful SES variability in the sample, the average correlation between SES and EF was small‐to‐medium in size (rrandom = .22, 95% CI [.17, .27]). Using only the six studies with multiple measures of EF, the relationship was medium in size (rrandom = .28, 95% CI [.18, .37]). In sum, this meta‐analysis supports the presence of SES disparities in EF and suggests that they are between small and medium in size, depending on the methods used to measure them. |
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