Portia Miller
University of Pittsburgh, PA·Psychology
When researchers ask how family money shapes how teenagers behave, they almost always measure income, the paycheck that arrives each month. Wealth, which is everything a household owns minus everything it owes, is a different kind of resource: it is a cushion for emergencies, and it is distributed far more unequally than income.
- Fields
Psychology
Social Science
Public Health & Epidemiology
- Topics
wealth inequality
net worth poverty
adolescent problem behavior
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Feb 2028
What they work on
- Measure family wealth, household assets minus debts, repeatedly across nine observations in 750 families with adolescents aged 13 to 15, to describe how wealth inequality and net worth poverty change over time and differ across socioeconomic, racial, and ethnic groups.
- Test how family wealth interacts with income level and income volatility, the unpredictable month-to-month swings in earnings, in predicting adolescent problem behaviors in a socioeconomically and racially diverse longitudinal cohort.
- Examine whether investments of time and money and caregiver and adolescent stress mediate the link between wealth deprivation and problem behavior, using repeated caregiver and adolescent reports.
- Test whether expectations for the future and perceptions and manifestations of social class explain how low or negative household net worth relates to adolescent psychosocial functioning.
More about the research
About one-third of households with children have more debt than assets. This project asks whether that kind of economic fragility helps explain the ongoing rise in mental health and behavior problems among adolescents.
Why it matters
Programs meant to reduce adolescent behavior problems in economically marginalized families currently have little evidence about wealth, as opposed to income, to work from. By showing whether, and through which pathways, having few assets and substantial debt relates to teen problem behavior, this work could help prevention and intervention efforts target the stressors, expectations, or family investments that matter most, and could inform how policy measures economic hardship in households with children.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Melissa Lippold
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, NC·Psychology
Test whether adolescents' daily stressors (how often, how severe, and how upsetting) and parents' reactions to them predict parent cardiometabolic risk and inflammation, both at one time point and over time, in 718 parent–child pairs.
Erin Thompson
Florida International University, FL·Psychology·Early-career
Examine how exclusionary school discipline, such as suspension, relates to adolescent mental health and substance use in the ABCD Study, accounting for neighborhood, school, behavioral and socioeconomic factors.
Audrey Pettifor
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, NC·Public Health & Epidemiology
Test whether the longitudinal link between childhood adversity and depression differs by cash transfer exposure, using HPTN 068 trial data on 2,533 rural South African girls and Child Support Grant data from the Agincourt surveillance system.
The school
University of Pittsburgh: 83 labs on PI Pages, $1.5B a year on research, 403 research doctorates a year.
Reach out
A start for your email. Fill in the brackets.