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Children's Mental Health Over The Early Life Course: The Impact Of Economic Resources, Neighborhood Disorder, And Family Processes, Jinette M. Comeau

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Drawing upon a stress process and life course framework, and using data from the Child Supplement of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, the three papers presented in this dissertation examine the extent to which economic resources, neighborhood disorder, and family processes influence children’s trajectories of mental health.

In the first paper, I empirically construct six categories that represent children with comparable profiles of family income over time: increasing, decreasing, fluctuating, and stability across low-, medium-, and high-income families. The income categories are incorporated in multiple group latent growth curve models to assess the extent to which they initiate and …