Rural Upstate New York Childhood Poverty, Sleep, and Mental Health Longitudinal Dataset (Wave 1–3)

This dataset contains longitudinal data from a rural upstate New York cohort designed to examine the developmental consequences of childhood poverty. Families were recruited to oversample households at or below the federal poverty line. Data span three waves from childhood into adolescence. Key variables include Wave 1 income-to-needs ratio, Wave 2 child-reported sleep disturbance, and Wave 3 youth mental health (Youth Self-Report Total Problems), along with demographic covariates (age in months and sex assigned at birth). The dataset supports prospective analyses testing whether sleep disturbance mediates the association between childhood poverty and later mental health outcomes. For primary analyses, Wave 1 income-to-needs, Wave 2 sleep disturbance, and Wave 1 age were standardized prior to estimation. Mental health outcomes and sex were modeled on their original scales. Mediation was estimated using structural equation modeling with full-information maximum likelihood (MLR), and indirect effects were calculated using the product-of-coefficients approach. This dataset corresponds to Sample 1 (“Rural Upstate New York”) described in: Evans, G.W., Rahai, R., Fuller-Rowell, T., Kim, P., & Patterson, G. (2026). Sleep as an underlying mechanism linking childhood poverty and mental health.