J Lawrence Aber
Biographic Data
| ID | 153480 |
|---|---|
| NAME | J Lawrence Aber |
| GIVEN NAMES | J Lawrence |
| FAMILY NAME | Aber |
| SIGNATURE | ABER J L |
| AFFILIATIONS | New York University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8614-2963 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 68 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 691 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 68 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1981 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 13 |
Investigating the bidirectional relationships between social and emotional learning and academic outcomes among refugee students
This study investigates bidirectional relationships between Syrian refugee children’s social and emotional learning (SEL) skills and academic performance in an education support program in Lebanon. Using data from a cluster randomized control trial with 2,757 students who completed performance-based academic assessments and reports of their SEL skills from 131 teachers, we examine bidirectional associations between academic and five teacher-obser…
A Conceptual Framework for Education Research in Conflict and Protracted Crisis (Ericc)
Despite growing interest in education for children in conflict and crisis (CAC) settings, evidence on how these children learn and develop—and how best to support them—remains limited. The fragmented research landscape across disciplinary traditions and sectoral silos limits holistic understanding and actionable insights to inform policies and programs. By focusing on four drivers of learning and development—access, quality, continuity, and coher…
Understanding the effects of values affirmation on deaf students in Nepal
In this paper, we present two studies from the first randomized controlled trial on the impact of a values affirmation intervention on academic performance and psychological well-being in school for deaf students in secondary deaf schools in Nepal. In Study 1, we found moderate and suggestive evidence that values affirmation had a small effect on lowering students’ perceived stereotype threats and improving their academic performance. Contrary to…
Testing the impact of a skill-targeted social and emotional learning curriculum and its variation by pre- and postmigration conflict experiences
Teacher depressive symptoms and children's school readiness in Ghana
This study investigated associations between kindergarten teachers' (N = 208) depressive symptoms and students' (Ghanaian nationals, N = 1490, M age = 5.8) school-readiness skills (early literacy, early numeracy, social–emotional skills, and executive function) across 208 schools in Ghana over one school year. Teachers' depressive symptoms in the fall negatively predicted students' overall school-readiness skills in the spring, controlling for sc…
Remote learning engagement and learning outcomes during school closures in Ghana
Medium-term protective effects of quality early childhood education during the Covid-19 pandemic in Ghana
The COVID-19 pandemic led to extended school closures globally. Access to remote learning opportunities during this time was vastly unequal within and across countries. Higher-quality early childhood education (ECE) can improve later academic outcomes, but longer-term effects during crises are unknown. This study provides the first experimental evidence of how previously attending a higher-quality ECE program affected child engagement in remote l…
Supporting Syrian Refugee Children’s Academic and Social-Emotional Learning in National Education Systems
Experimental evidence on strategies to support refugee children's integration into host-country public schools is needed. We employ a three-arm, site-randomized controlled trial to test the impact of short-term access to two versions of nonformal remedial programming infused with social-emotional learning (SEL) among Syrian refugee children in Lebanese public schools. Remedial programming with classroom climate-targeted SEL practices improved chi…
Using a Multi-level Framework to Test Empirical Relationships Among HIV/Aids-Related Stigma, Health Service Barriers, and HIV Outcomes in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa
Childhood Economic Well-Being in South Africa
Early Childhood Teachers’ Lives in Context
This study explores the personal, professional, and contextual conditions faced by early childhood education ( ECE ) teachers in under‐resourced settings and how these relate to teacher responsiveness to professional development ( PD ): namely, teacher attrition (a sign of PD failure when occurring shortly after PD ), take‐up of offered PD , adherence to PD training/materials, and quality of implementation. We use data from six disadvantaged dist…
The Multilevel Relationships of HIV‐Related Stigma to Child and Caregiver Mental Health among HIV‐Affected Households in South Africa
HIV/AIDS‐related (HAR) stigma is still a prevalent problem in Sub‐Saharan Africa, and has been found to be related to mental health of HIV‐positive individuals. However, no studies in the Sub‐Saharan African context have yet examined the relationship between HAR stigma and mental health among HIV‐negative, HIV‐affected adults and families; nor have any studies in this context yet examined stigma as an ecological construct predicting mental health…
Increasing understanding for syrian refugee children with empirical evidence
Today, Syrians represent the largest refugee group in the world. Since the beginning of the Syrian civil war in 2012, more than 5.2 million Syrians have fled the country as refugees, and about half of these are children. Most of the Syrian refugees are currently living in neighboring countries, with Turkey hosting the largest group with numbers above 3.2 million as of November 2017. Lebanon, Jordan and Iraq combined host about 2 million Syrian re…
Measuring and predicting process quality in Ghanaian pre-primary classrooms using the Teacher Instructional Practices and Processes System (TIPPS)
Cohort effects in children’s delay of gratification
In the 1960s at Stanford University's Bing Preschool, children were given the option of taking an immediate, smaller reward or receiving a delayed, larger reward by waiting until the experimenter returned. Since then, the "Marshmallow Test" has been used in numerous studies to assess delay of gratification. Yet, no prior study has compared the performance of children across the decades. Common wisdom suggests children today would wait less long, …
Converging on child mental health – toward shared global action for child development
We are a group of researchers and clinicians with collective experience in child survival, nutrition, cognitive and social development, and treatment of common mental conditions. We join together to welcome an expanded definition of child development to guide global approaches to child health and overall social development. We call for resolve to integrate maternal and child mental health with child health, nutrition, and development services and…
Exploring patterns of receipt of cash grants, health care, and education among 7–10 year old children in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa
The Influence of Conduct Problems and Callous-Unemotional Traits on Academic Development Among Youth
Cost Analysis of a School-Based Social and Emotional Learning and Literacy Intervention
Purpose : There is limited research on the costs of social and emotional learning (SEL) interventions [Crowley, Jones, Greenberg, Feinberg & Spoth (2012). Resource Consumption of a Diffusion Model for Prevention Programs: The PROSPER Delivery System. Journal of Adolescent Health, 50 (3), 256–263]. This paper describes a comprehensive methodology for determining the costs of a successful universal, school-based SEL intervention that was implemente…
Preliminary impacts of the “Learning to Read in a Healing Classroom” intervention on teacher well-being in the Democratic Republic of the Congo
Patterns of Time Use Among Low-Income Urban Minority Adolescents and Associations with Academic Outcomes and Problem Behaviors
Shrinking the Public Safety Net or Helping the Poor Play by the Rules? The Changes in the State-Level Policies That Affected Low-Income Families With Children in the Welfare Reform Era
Despite the claimed success of the 1996 Welfare Reform, little research using multivariate regression has examined changes in multiple public safety-net programs. Thus, we still do not know whether public safety-net programs for the poor have shrunk or increased nationwide, along with the sharp declines in cash assistance. Using state-level data between 1994 and 2002 and state fixed-effects model, this study examines changes in nine safety-net pr…
Selection and Socialization of Aggressive and Prosocial Behavior
This study evaluated the extent to which fourth‐grade students ( M age = 8.62) select and are influenced by their peers' aggressive and prosocial behavior and the extent to which intra‐individual social cognitions moderate these processes. Two waves of data were collected in the fall and spring of one academic year from children attending 18 N ew Y ork C ity public elementary schools. Stochastic actor‐based social network analysis was used to eva…
The effects of poverty on the mental, emotional, and behavioral health of children and youth
Drawing on psychological theory to understand and improve antipoverty policies
Increasingly, psychological theory and research are used to help design and guide social policy efforts. One particular antipoverty policy that is gaining popularity is conditional cash transfers (CCTs), where cash is transferred to needy households, conditioned on their making prestipulated investments in their children’s health and education. CCTs have been rigorously evaluated and implemented as policy by governments in several countries. Outs…
The development of ethnic identity during adolescence
The development of ethnic identity is a critical facet of adolescence, particularly for adolescents of color. In order to examine the developmental trajectory of ethnic identity, African American, Latino American, and European American early and middle adolescents (N = 420) were assessed over 3 years. Two components of ethnic identity were assessed--group-esteem was found to rise for both early and middle adolescents; exploration rose for middle …
The Dynamics of Economic Disadvantage and Children's Life Chances
Recent research suggests that child well-being and subsequent status attainment are influenced not only by the duration of exposure to economic disadvantage during childhood, but also by the timing and sequencing of exposure. Unfortunately, traditional measures of children's economic deprivation typically fail to differentiate between exposures to disadvantage at different stages in childhood and largely ignore how economic circumstances change o…
Racial/Ethnic Identity, Congruence with the Social Context, and the Transition to High School
The transition to high school may serve as a race/ethnicity consciousness-raising experience that stimulates the development of one’s racial/ethnic identity depending on newcomers’ racial/ethnic congruence with the student body and staff, as well as their perceived social transactions with the new school. The nature of this development was tested within samples of poor, urban, Black, White, and Latino students (n = 144). Racial/ethnic identity (g…
Mothers' representations of their relationships with their toddlers
Mothers (N = 125) and their firstborn sons were studied over an 11-month period to examine relations between mothers' representations of their relationships with their children (measured at 15 months by using the Parent Development Interview [PDI]), adult representations of attachment (measured at 12 months by using the Adult Attachment Interview [AAI]), and observed mothering (measured at 15 and 21 months). Results indicate (a) that mothers clas…
Developmental trajectories toward violence in middle childhood
The present study addressed 3 questions concerning (a) the course of developmental trajectories toward violence over middle childhood, (b) whether and how the course of these trajectories differed by demographic subgroups of children, and (c) how responsive these trajectories were to a universal, school-based preventive intervention. Four waves of data on features of children’s social-emotional development known to forecast aggression/violence we…
Effects of maltreatment on young children's socioemotional development
Relationship of socioeconomic status to the etiology and developmental sequelae of physical child abuse
This article studies how socioeconomic status (SES) may be related to the etiology of physical child abuse and to the consequences of abuse for child development. It reports a collaboration of two independent child abuse research projects. The general perspective and design of these two projects overlapped, which made possible the assessment of the generalizability of findings across samples from two geographical locations that differ in ethnic a…
The role of strategic attention deployment in development of self-regulation
Toddlers' use of effective attention deployment strategies to cope with separation from the mother and with maternal behavior predicted the use of effective delay-of-gratification strategies at age 5, even though the contexts, measures, and manifest behaviors were different. Toddlers who used distraction strategies during a brief separation from the mother were able, at age 5, to delay immediate gratification longer for more valued rewards. Toddl…
Development and validation of adolescent‐perceived microsystem scales
Developed and validated instruments for urban and culturally diverse adolescents to assess their self‐reported transactions with family, peer, school, and neighborhood microsystems for the constructs of social support, daily hassles, and involvement. The sample of 998 youth were from schools in three Eastern cities with high percentages of economically disadvantaged youth. Data were collected before and after the transition to junior high school …
The impact of the transition to high school on the self‐system and perceived social context of poor urban youth
Examined the effects of the normative school transition to senior high school ( n =330) on the self‐system and perceived school and peer social contexts of poor, black ( n =83), European American ( n =115), Latino ( n =105), and Asian American ( n =27) youth in the public school systems of three Eastern urban cities. The only negative effect of the school transition on the self‐system was a decline in grade point average (GPA). Concurrently, the …
Effects of Welfare Reform on Teenage Parents and Their Children
A key question in welfare policy concerns the potential that welfare-to-work programs have to develop in teenage parents the motivation and skills to provide financially for themselves and their children. The Teenage Parent Welfare Demonstration was a major experiment initiated in 1986 by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and evaluated by Mathematica Policy Research, Inc., to test the impact of a welfare-to-work program for teenage…
Selection and Socialization of Aggressive and Prosocial Behavior
This study evaluated the extent to which fourth‐grade students ( M age = 8.62) select and are influenced by their peers' aggressive and prosocial behavior and the extent to which intra‐individual social cognitions moderate these processes. Two waves of data were collected in the fall and spring of one academic year from children attending 18 N ew Y ork C ity public elementary schools. Stochastic actor‐based social network analysis was used to eva…
Assessment of interpersonal negotiation strategies in youth engaged in problem behaviors
Chez 271 adolescents de 16 ans sont examines les liens entre les niveaux et les styles des strategies de negociation interpersonnelle, la competence dans la resolution de problemes sociaux et la presence de troubles comportementaux
The Risk and Protective Functions of Perceived Family and Peer Microsystems Among Urban Adolescents in Poverty
Utilized a pattern‐based approach to discover the different constellations of perceived social transactions separately for family and peer systems and explored the risk and protective functions of these microsystem profiles for both depression and antisocial behavior among a sample of ethnically and racially diverse urban adolescents living in poverty. Measures of perceived social support, involvement and hassles with family and peers, as well as…
Stability and change in mothers' representations of their relationship with their toddlers
This study examined several issues in the developmental dynamics of parents' representations of their relationship with their toddlers. The authors studied 125 mothers and their firstborn toddler sons over a 13-month period. Mothers took the Parent Development Interview twice, when children were 15 and 28 months of age. Home observations of parent-child interactions and maternal ratings of daily hassles were collected when children were 21 and 27…
When Effort is Threatening
Urban Adolescents' Transition to Junior High School and Protective Family Transactions
This study explored the role of perceived family transactions of daily hassles, social support, and involvement with family in leisure activities in a sample of racially and ethnically diverse urban adolescents living in poverty as they made the transition to junior high school. Adolescents who perceived fewer daily hassles and more involvement with their families prior to the transition to junior high school appeared less vulnerable to declines …
Item-Level Discordance in Parent and Adolescent Reports of Parenting Behavior and Its Implications for Adolescents’ Mental Health and Relationships with Their Parents
Perceived Family and Peer Transactions and Self-Esteem among Urban Early Adolescents
This research extends previous work that identified groups of youth characterized by profiles of perceived family and peer transactions. Predictions derived from self-enhancement and self-consistency theories concerning how such transactions might relate to self-esteem in a diverse sample of early adolescents (N = 635) were investigated. Both theories indicate independent contributions of family and peer transactions to self-esteem. The theories …
Back to the Future
Contextual Competence
The authors develop and validate multidimensional and contextual profiles of competence among low-income, urban, middle adolescents (N = 560). The assessment of contextual competence was based on youth self-reports of involvement, performance, and relationship quality in the peer, school, athletic, employment, religious, and cultural contexts. A principal components analysis of these engagement indices revealed the six expected components with th…
The Influence of Conduct Problems and Callous-Unemotional Traits on Academic Development Among Youth
Shrinking the Public Safety Net or Helping the Poor Play by the Rules? The Changes in the State-Level Policies That Affected Low-Income Families With Children in the Welfare Reform Era
Despite the claimed success of the 1996 Welfare Reform, little research using multivariate regression has examined changes in multiple public safety-net programs. Thus, we still do not know whether public safety-net programs for the poor have shrunk or increased nationwide, along with the sharp declines in cash assistance. Using state-level data between 1994 and 2002 and state fixed-effects model, this study examines changes in nine safety-net pr…
Measuring and predicting process quality in Ghanaian pre-primary classrooms using the Teacher Instructional Practices and Processes System (TIPPS)
Drawing on psychological theory to understand and improve antipoverty policies
Increasingly, psychological theory and research are used to help design and guide social policy efforts. One particular antipoverty policy that is gaining popularity is conditional cash transfers (CCTs), where cash is transferred to needy households, conditioned on their making prestipulated investments in their children’s health and education. CCTs have been rigorously evaluated and implemented as policy by governments in several countries. Outs…
Developmental considerations in the definition of child maltreatment
Conflict among definitions of child maltreatment abounds. Diagnostic, sociological, legal, and research approaches each focus on a different aspect of the phenomenon as the defining factor. Improved definitions require careful analysis of objectives for defining child maltreatment and a consideration of the developmental nature of the phenomenon
Effects of maltreatment on young children's socioemotional development
Assessment of interpersonal negotiation strategies in youth engaged in problem behaviors
Chez 271 adolescents de 16 ans sont examines les liens entre les niveaux et les styles des strategies de negociation interpersonnelle, la competence dans la resolution de problemes sociaux et la presence de troubles comportementaux
Relationship of socioeconomic status to the etiology and developmental sequelae of physical child abuse
This article studies how socioeconomic status (SES) may be related to the etiology of physical child abuse and to the consequences of abuse for child development. It reports a collaboration of two independent child abuse research projects. The general perspective and design of these two projects overlapped, which made possible the assessment of the generalizability of findings across samples from two geographical locations that differ in ethnic a…
Educational Risk and Resilience in African-American Youth
James Patrick Connell, Margaret Beale Spencer, J. Lawrence Aber, Educational Risk and Resilience in African-American Youth: Context, Self, Action, and Outcomes in School, Child Development, Vol. 65, No. 2, Children and Poverty (Apr., 1994), pp. 493-506
The Impact of School Transitions in Early Adolescence on the Self-System and Perceived Social Context of Poor Urban Youth
Edward Seidman, LaRue Allen, J. Lawrence Aber, Christina Mitchell, Joanna Feinman, The Impact of School Transitions in Early Adolescence on the Self-System and Perceived Social Context of Poor Urban Youth, Child Development, Vol. 65, No. 2, Children and Poverty (Apr., 1994), pp. 507-522
Effects of Welfare Reform on Teenage Parents and Their Children
A key question in welfare policy concerns the potential that welfare-to-work programs have to develop in teenage parents the motivation and skills to provide financially for themselves and their children. The Teenage Parent Welfare Demonstration was a major experiment initiated in 1986 by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and evaluated by Mathematica Policy Research, Inc., to test the impact of a welfare-to-work program for teenage…
Development and validation of adolescent‐perceived microsystem scales
Developed and validated instruments for urban and culturally diverse adolescents to assess their self‐reported transactions with family, peer, school, and neighborhood microsystems for the constructs of social support, daily hassles, and involvement. The sample of 998 youth were from schools in three Eastern cities with high percentages of economically disadvantaged youth. Data were collected before and after the transition to junior high school …
Young children in poverty
The War Experiences and Psychosocial Development of Children in Lebanon
The impact of the transition to high school on the self‐system and perceived social context of poor urban youth
Examined the effects of the normative school transition to senior high school ( n =330) on the self‐system and perceived school and peer social contexts of poor, black ( n =83), European American ( n =115), Latino ( n =105), and Asian American ( n =27) youth in the public school systems of three Eastern urban cities. The only negative effect of the school transition on the self‐system was a decline in grade point average (GPA). Concurrently, the …
The Effects of Poverty on Child Health and Development
Poverty has been shown to negatively influence child health and development along a number of dimensions. For example, poverty–net of a variety of potentially confounding factors—is associated with increased neonatal and post-neonatal mortality rates, greater risk of injuries resulting from accidents or physical abuse/neglect, higher risk for asthma, and lower developmental scores in a range of tests at multiple ages. Despite the extensive litera…
The relations between maternal behaviors and urban preschool children's internal working models of attachment security
Interviewed 93 African-American, low-income women who had become pregnant as teenagers and their preschool-aged children in their homes. Mothers answered questions regarding their everyday stresses and feelings of depression. Children were assessed for receptive vocabulary ability, then video-taped completing five stories thematically related to attachment experiences with mother and rated on their security of attachment. Mothers and children wer…
Back to the Future
The Risk and Protective Functions of Perceived Family and Peer Microsystems Among Urban Adolescents in Poverty
Utilized a pattern‐based approach to discover the different constellations of perceived social transactions separately for family and peer systems and explored the risk and protective functions of these microsystem profiles for both depression and antisocial behavior among a sample of ethnically and racially diverse urban adolescents living in poverty. Measures of perceived social support, involvement and hassles with family and peers, as well as…
Stability and change in mothers' representations of their relationship with their toddlers
This study examined several issues in the developmental dynamics of parents' representations of their relationship with their toddlers. The authors studied 125 mothers and their firstborn toddler sons over a 13-month period. Mothers took the Parent Development Interview twice, when children were 15 and 28 months of age. Home observations of parent-child interactions and maternal ratings of daily hassles were collected when children were 21 and 27…
Mothers' representations of their relationships with their toddlers
Mothers (N = 125) and their firstborn sons were studied over an 11-month period to examine relations between mothers' representations of their relationships with their children (measured at 15 months by using the Parent Development Interview [PDI]), adult representations of attachment (measured at 12 months by using the Adult Attachment Interview [AAI]), and observed mothering (measured at 15 and 21 months). Results indicate (a) that mothers clas…
Neighborhood Poverty
Neighborhood Poverty
Neighborhood Poverty: Context and Consequences for Children, Volume I, and Neighborhood Poverty: Policy Implications in Studying Neighborhoods, Volume II. Jeanne BrooksGunn, Greg J. Duncan, & J. Lawrence Aber (Eds.). New York: Russell Sage Foundation. 1997. 334 pp. and 238 pp. ISBNs 0-8154-145-9 and 0-87154-146-7. $49.95 and $39.95 cloth. This two-volume study of the effects of poor urban neighborhoods on families makes a stimulating contribution…
Perceived Family and Peer Transactions and Self-Esteem among Urban Early Adolescents
This research extends previous work that identified groups of youth characterized by profiles of perceived family and peer transactions. Predictions derived from self-enhancement and self-consistency theories concerning how such transactions might relate to self-esteem in a diverse sample of early adolescents (N = 635) were investigated. Both theories indicate independent contributions of family and peer transactions to self-esteem. The theories …
The role of strategic attention deployment in development of self-regulation
The role of strategic attention deployment in development of self-regulation
Toddlers' use of effective attention deployment strategies to cope with separation from the mother and with maternal behavior predicted the use of effective delay-of-gratification strategies at age 5, even though the contexts, measures, and manifest behaviors were different. Toddlers who used distraction strategies during a brief separation from the mother were able, at age 5, to delay immediate gratification longer for more valued rewards. Toddl…
Racial/Ethnic Identity, Congruence with the Social Context, and the Transition to High School
The transition to high school may serve as a race/ethnicity consciousness-raising experience that stimulates the development of one’s racial/ethnic identity depending on newcomers’ racial/ethnic congruence with the student body and staff, as well as their perceived social transactions with the new school. The nature of this development was tested within samples of poor, urban, Black, White, and Latino students (n = 144). Racial/ethnic identity (g…
Measuring and Monitoring Children’s Well-Being
The Dynamics of Child Poverty in Industrialised Countries
A child poverty rate of ten percent could mean that every tenth child is always poor, or that all children are in poverty for one month in every ten. Knowing where reality lies between these extremes is vital to understanding the problem facing many countries of poverty among the young. This unique study goes beyond the standard analysis of child poverty based on poverty rates at one point in time and documents how much movement into and out of p…
Psychology (55 works) · Developmental psychology (44 works) · Medicine (31 works) · Social Psychology (24 works) · Child and Adolescent Psychosocial and Emotional Development (23 works) · Political science (20 works) · Early Childhood Education and Development (19 works) · Social Psychology (18 works) · Clinical Psychology (15 works) · Economics (14 works)