The Quality of Microsystems and Child Development

Jose Antonio Campos-Gil; Patricia Ortega-Andeane

The gap between income and development is a social current problem, but it is unknown about neurocognitive or psychological mechanisms, which couldn explain how certain deficits in childhood microsystems are related to children's executive functioning and the stress experience; in Latin american countries little has been studied about accumulated exposure that represents such deficiencies in more than one environment.

Taking this into consideration was developed the Scale of Environmental Quality in the Home (a= .790) , which consists of 26 items with a dichotomous scale of response, to examine the presence or absence of aspects that your family environment, in the same way, it was built also the Environmental Quality Scale in School with 24 items (a= .820).

The final items resulted from the examination of the HOME Inventory (Linver, Brooks-Gunn & Cabrera, 2004, Bradley et al, 1989), as well as the Environmental Chaos Scale (Campos, 2016), after a discussion with experts these were adapted according to the most relevant aspects in mexican culture.

Each item consists of a graphic representation, to facilitate the understanding of children, this test was run on in the tool PEBL (The Psychology Experiment Building Language).

As a unit of analysis, we evaluated 115 children with a mean age of 11 years (53.7% girls and 45.1% boys), from an 3 elementary schools in Mexico, located in an areas cataloged as low-income A Quasi-Experimental design was used, with pre-established groups, in parallel the groups were chosen by means of a factorial matrix (3x2), looking for at least three levels of the variable environmental quality, and two of the socioeconomic level.

It is expected that the cumulative exposure to these deficits in environmental quality will have statistically significant impacts that exceed the singular effect of these factors in the development of executive functioning and stress.

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