Study Suggest Murder Rate May Affect Kid's IQ Scores

A New York Sociology Professor has released the results of a study which suggest that a murder in a neighborhood may significantly reduce a child's score on an IQ test.  This would happen even if the child did not witness the murder.  Analysts think that this may fit into the type of results seen in post traumatic stress cases.  In an IQ test, the normal score is 100.  One standard deviation is 15 points.  If a child took an IQ test within one week of a murder occurring in their neighborhood, their IQ test score was 7 or 8 points lower than a similar child living in a similar neighborhood in which there was no murder.  The test took samples from tests taken from 6,000 murders that occurred in Chicago.  What is interesting is that the study suggests that this effect wears away after about a week or nine days.  In other words, the test results return back to normal after a week or nine days of the murder.  But in some neighborhoods, statistics would suggest that some kids are subjected to this phenomenon a week a month.  Nationally, black children score one standard deviation lower than white children on standardized tests.  This study suggests a possible partial explanation for this.

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