Researchers find test scores fall, pregnancies out of wedlock rise

By Monica Chen

mchen@heraldsun.com; 419-6636

DURHAM -- In addition to unemployment and decreased pay, low-income communities may be impacted in other, long-term ways by the recession, according to a researcher at Duke University's Sanford School of Policy.

Using in-depth interviews and juxtaposing her research with other studies of low-income communities, Christina Gibson-Davis, an assistant professor at Sanford, said her research team found a decrease in test scores and higher likelihood for out-of-wedlock pregnancies during a recession.

"In a recession, it tends to be those at the bottom who are most affected -- People who have the lowest levels of resources, both monetarily and psychologically," she said.

The research showed that a 1 percent increase in the working-age population that lost jobs is associated with a 2 percent decrease in standardized reading and math scores in that county in that year.

For instance, if there are 100,000 working-age citizens in a county, and 1,000 of them lost their jobs, then test scores in that county should decline by 2 percent, Gibson-Davis said. The results were gathered from North Carolina end-of-grade reading and math tests for eighth-graders, among families whose job losses had occurred within a few months of the test.

The research also found that fewer pregnant women in low-income communities will marry, and counter-intuitively, that the recession will not deter women from having out-of-wedlock births.

Gibson-Davis said this could be a result of marriage being associated with a middle class standard of living, whereas the social stigma associated with having children out of wedlock has been lessening for decades.

"People don't want to get married before achieving that middle class standard," she said. "People look at it as sort of a goal and accomplishment that they can put off."

The recession also will not deter women from having out-of-wedlock births, because when jobs are scarce women have less to forgo by having a child.

"What that means is that if I'm not working, then I'm not giving up earnings by having a child, because I'm not employed anyway," Gibson-Davis explained.

"It may seem kind of counter-intuitive that people think marriage requires money and having a child does not. But in low-resource communities, where women may not have many educational and vocational opportunities, then having a child may be a way to provide meaning to their lives," she added.