A small percentage of a nation’s population may be contributing the most cost, but clinical psychologist Terrie Edith Moffitt said it may be possible to predict who will fall into that category.
Moffitt shared her research on predicting who will be the ultra-high-cost contributors to society on Friday at the Nursing and Health Innovation building at ASU’s Downtown campus.
This cost is measured by the likelihood of a person to receive welfare and other related factors. Some of these factors include months of social-welfare benefits, years of single-parent child raising, time and amount of cigarette smoking, number of hospital admissions, number of pharmacy prescription fills, criminal court convictions and insurance claims.
The data set used in this research was created using population segmentation based on various high-cost factors, Moffitt said.
Moffitt believes that it’s a “remarkable miracle” to be able to predict outcomes from childhood to adulthood. The research showed that the outcome of the data group can be revealed in the preschool ages.
Brain health in the first three years is especially important in predicting the ultra-high-cost segment, Moffitt said. She was pleased with the results and was able to show the ability to prove predictability over chance.
“As we expected, the segmentation on the outcome allowed us to prove prediction quite well,” Moffitt said.
Some of the risk factors Moffitt cited for these predictions were low family socio-economic status, child maltreatment, low self-control and low IQ. The study showed that these factors were able to predict 80 percent of the people who would go on to fill multiple high-cost factors.
Moffitt said the study’s results were largely in line with the Pareto Principle, which states that 80 percent effects come from 20 percent of the causes.
“Twenty percent of people contribute disproportionately to specific social and health problems,” Moffitt said.
In other words, Moffitt said that there was an identifiable group of 20 percent of the population who accounted for 80 percent of high-cost factors in adult life. Additionally, the research revealed a second group that contributes another surprising statistic.
Out of the data set, roughly 45 percent fell into a category that was considered low-cost to their country, Moffitt said.
While Moffitt’s main focus was on the predictability of the ultra-high-cost portion, this finding was still useful.
“This should not diminish our concerning interest in the group of people on the other end,” Moffitt said. “These are the people that are paying in to their society.”
The study has been ongoing for over 30 years, and the data group is a cohort of over 1000 participants born in New Zealand.
Moffitt said the participants began assessment at ages as early as 3-years-old, and that a majority have continued in their involvement. The most recent assessment was done in 2012, making the average age of the group 38 years old.
The timeframe means assessments are done at various ages throughout the participant’s life. Each consists of a full 8-hour day of data collecting. If the participant no longer lives in New Zealand, a plane ticket is provided for them to return and be reevaluated.
Moffitt was hopeful about her study, but did express some limitations that would affect a nation’s willingness to respond to preventing a child from becoming a part of the ultra-high-cost group.
“There’s controversy about whether it’s worth the great cost of nationwide intervention in childhood universal preschool programs,” she said.
However, Moffitt’s said that the demonstration of a small set of risk factors contributing to a majority of high-cost services may serve as a sufficient motivator.
While the research did reflect that it may be possible to predict ultra-high-cost contributors in a society, the relatively confined sample size did leave some skeptical.
“That small of a sample size and in a different country with a completely different infrastructure cannot be used in the United States,” Mauricio Casillas, a senior at ASU, said.
While the research has yet to be published, some are excited about the focus of the experiment. Kathleen Padilla, a student at the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice, is pleased with the direction of the research.
“We need to study all people and not just the people who are committing crime,” Padilla said.
Contact the reporter at Dustin.Quiroz-Clark@asu.edu.
