WATCH: Race and racial equity in early childhood development

Clemens Noelke speaks at a special research forum on racial equity in early childhood development, hosted by the Crane Center for Early Childhood Research and Policy and the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race 

In this webinar, Marisha Humphries, associate professor in the Department of Educational Psychology at the University of Illinois Chicago, and Clemens Noelke, research director for diversitydatakids.org, speak about their research on racial equity and early childhood development. 

In Noelke's presentation, he reviews how unequal neighborhood environments are an important factor contributing to racial/ethnic inequities in children’s healthy development and discusses different ways of measuring neighborhood contexts: single-measure indicators and composite indices of neighborhood opportunity. Noelke shows that composite indices differ considerably in their construction and predictive validity, and offer some clear advantages compared to single-measure metrics of neighborhood opportunity. He concludes with an outlook of what the future of neighborhood opportunity maps and their applications might look like.