Consistency and Continuity in Material and Psychosocial Adversity Among Australian Families with Young Children

Abstract

Prior studies on longitudinal continuity of adversity have mostly examined persistence of individual adversity, rather than of families and have focussed mainly on material disadvantage. However, adversity is multi-dimensional, and in the case of families with children, it includes psychosocial as well as material elements. While both material and psychosocial elements are recognized as critical to child development, these aspects of family adversity are often studied in isolation and there is a dearth of longitudinal evidence on the extent to which such factors are transient or persistent. Using the first three waves (2004–2005, 2006–2007, 2008–2009) of the longitudinal study of Australian children this paper investigated the consistency and continuity of multiple adversity in families with children using material and psychosocial indicators. First, longitudinal factor analysis determined that a consistent factor structure of multiple adversity adequately fit the data longitudinally. Second, cross-tabular analysis showed significant changes in the prevalence of specific adversities over waves. In particular adversity related to changes in family composition and social support followed an increasing trend. Adversity in two material elements—economic status and hardship—decreased over time. Third, variance-components models revealed that though aggregate scores of material and psychosocial adversity indicated a high degree of continuity over time, continuity in disaggregated measures showed that within families a great deal of variability in adversity occurs, with intra-class correlations ranging from 0.27 to 0.84. The more persistent forms of adversity—family, substance use, economic adversity—are areas where targeted interventions are feasible while employment conditions and time pressure are more transient and may require intervention at the population level to reduce overall prevalence of the adversities. Our study has reinforced the need to assess psychosocial adversity in studies of families with children as a balance to the more commonly utilized material adversity.

Appendices

Appendix 1: Adjustments Made to Wave 1 Summary Measures of Adversity

We draw on cross-sectional summary measures of adversity developed by Gubhaju et al. (2013) using Wave 1 of the LSAC. To ensure comparability across three waves of the survey, for our present analysis some adjustments had to be made to the indicators and constructs used in the Wave 1 analysis. Specifically, the indicator “Difficulty affording medical care for study child” was removed from the hardship construct and the indicator “no fruit and vegetable consumption” was dropped from the parent wellbeing construct as these questions were not asked in Wave 2 and/or Wave 3. The indicator “any medical condition” was also removed from the parent wellbeing construct as there was an unusual and unexplained large decline in the percent reporting any medical condition between Wave 1 and subsequent waves (Wave 2 and Wave 3). Similarly, the life events construct was removed from this particular analysis because of a change in the way the question was asked between Wave 1 and Wave 2/Wave 3. The time pressure (work) construct has been reconfigured. The cross-sectional Wave 1 measure consisted of four items—main earner (1) works long hours, (2) desires less work hours; (3) has high work-family strains; (4) has high work-family gains. Due to a change in the way the question was asked between Wave 1 and Wave 2/Wave 3, the percentage desiring less work hours increased twofold between waves. Once this item was removed the Wave 1 factor structure was no longer supported and thus the construct was re-configured based on four indicators: main income earner working long hours plus three items from the work-family strains scale (strongly agree or agree) that (1) because of my work responsibilities I have missed out on home or family activities; (2) because of my work responsibilities my family time is less enjoyable and more pressured; (3) because of my family responsibilities I have had to turn down work activities or opportunities that I would prefer to take on.

Appendix 2: Indicator-Level Definitions of Adversity

2.1 Family

The five measures of family adversity that are included in this domain are being a teenage mother at birth of study child, sole-parent family, presence of a step parent at home, presence of a step or half sibling at home, four or more children in the family.

2.2 Socioeconomic Position and Hardship

Measures of adversity in this domain include low parental education (defined as either both parents or a sole parent with less than year 12 education), bottom 20 % of equivalised family income, neither parent in paid work (or a sole parent not having paid work was), and six financial hardship items that assessed hardship due to a shortage of money in the last 12 months.

2.3 Employment Conditions

Measures of adversity in the employment conditions domain are if the main income earner works in a casual job, desires to work more hours, and has poor job quality. For single earner sole-parent families and single earner two-parent families, the main income earner is simply the sole income earner in the family—whether it is the mother or father. For dual-earner families, the parent that works more hours is defined as the main income earner. In the event where both mother and father work the same number of hours, main income earner is determined by the parent that has a permanent or ongoing job. In the remaining number of cases where both parents work the same number of hours and both have a permanent or ongoing job, the father is taken as the main income earner. Job quality was measured using the job quality index (JQI) developed by Strazdins et al. (2010). The JQI consists of four dichotomous work condition variables measuring whether or not the work condition is favourable or unfavourable in terms of family friendly leave, flexible hours, job control, and job security. Scores on each work condition were summed to create an index of job quality with scores ranging from 0 to 4 where higher scores indicate higher job quality. Our measure of adversity is poor job quality (0 or 1 on the index).

2.4 Parent Health and Wellbeing

Several indicators measured substance use, mental health, and health behaviours of both the mother and father. A complication in creating a summary score using fathers’ information is that it is only applicable to two-parent families. Our approach here was to create three summary scores—(1) a summary score for sole-parent families only, (2) a summary score for two-parent families where both the mother and father had answered the relevant question, and (3) a summary score for two-parent families where the father did not answer the relevant question, using only the mothers’ information. This was done to minimise the loss of cases as a result of missing data, especially on the fathers’ information. We then converted all three scales into percentiles and used these to obtain equivalent measure across the three sub-groups. In this domain, heavy drinking was defined as more than two drinks per day for women and more than four drinks per day for men and binge drinking as five or more drinks (for women) or seven or more drinks (for men) in a sitting 2–3 times a month or more often. These definitions were based on the 2001 Australian alcohol guidelines (National Health & Medical Research Council 2002). Current smoking represents a health adversity. Parent mental health was assessed using the Kessler K6 screening scale of psychological distress (Kessler et al. 2003). The six items of the Kessler scale were summed to create an overall psychological distress scale ranging from 0 to 24. Parents who scored eight and above were considered to have high psychological distress. Low level of coping was defined as coping “not at all” or “a little” on a question that asked, “how well do you think you are coping?” with response scales ranging from “not at all” to “extremely well.” Obesity was defined as a body mass score (BMI) of 30 and above. Sleep quality was measured by a question that rated overall sleep quality in the past month from very bad to very good. A rating of “very bad” was taken as poor sleep quality. No exercise was defined as not doing at least 30 min of moderate or vigorous physical activity in a week. Low global health efficacy was defined as “fair” or “poor” self-rated overall functioning and wellbeing versus good, very good, or excellent.

2.5 Time Pressure

Our derived measure of long total household work hours (45 h or more per week) includes unemployed families—work hours of families that had neither parent in paid work is set to zero and work hours for two-parent families was divided by 2 so that it was equivalent to work hours of sole-parent families. Frequency of feeling rushed asked how often the mother and/or father felt rushed. We considered those stating that they always felt rushed (as opposed to never, rarely, sometimes, or often) as experiencing adversity. The remaining time pressure indicators were only applicable to employed families only. Work-family strains are part of the work-family conflict scales consisting of the following items (1) because of my work responsibilities I have missed out on home or family activities; (2) because of my work responsibilities my family time is less enjoyable and more pressured; (3) because of my family responsibilities I have had to turn down work activities or opportunities that I would prefer to take on. Respondents stating strongly agree or agree are coded as having high work-family strains.

2.6 Parenting

In the LSAC, several scales were developed from questions relating to parenting behaviours, resulting in indices for parental warmth and hostile parenting (B cohort) or angry parenting (K cohort). Low parental warmth meant scoring on the bottom 20 % of the scale and high hostility/angry parenting meant scoring on the top 20 % of the scale. Low global parental self-efficacy was defined as a self-rating of “not being very good” or “having some trouble” being a parent compared to being “an average” to “a very good” parent.

2.7 Parent–Parent Relationships

This domain is only applicable to two-parent families and assess the relationship between the mother and their resident partner, which may not necessarily be the child’s parent. Unhappiness in the relationship meant being extremely unhappy to a little unhappy as opposed to happy to perfectly happy. Low relationship quality was defined as scoring on the bottom 20 % of the Hendrick Relationship Quality Scale (Hendrick 1988). High argumentative relationship was defined as scoring on the top 20 % of a modified conflict subscale from the Quality of Co-Parental Interaction scale (Ahrons 1981).

2.8 Social Support

High frequency of not getting needed support was defined if respondents stated they “very often” or “often” felt that they needed support and help but could not get it from anyone. Rare contact with family members meant being in contact less than once every month.