Doctoral Dissertation Research: Parenting, Family Communication, and Children's Behavior

本项目研究家庭条件如何减少与儿童犯罪、暴力和受害相关的其他风险因素的影响。最近对家庭的研究广泛涉及儿童代理对父母/儿童互动的影响。迄今为止，犯罪学的研究尚未将发展心理学的这些见解纳入对儿童犯罪、暴力和受害的解释中。该项目的资金用于收集两个独立的数据集（丹佛青年调查和全国青少年健康调查），以检查儿童/父母互动的质量是否以及如何导致儿童在可能发生犯罪、暴力和受害的环境中恢复过来。该项目将有助于更好地理解父母的做法如何在各种情况下产生积极的儿童行为结果。我们的具体目标是：(1)正确指定亲子互动的动态模型，并使用它来预测儿童的结果；(2)考虑家庭、父母和儿童特征对亲子互动和儿童结局的情境和条件作用；(3)扩展我们的模型，不仅预测青少年犯罪和暴力，还预测受害、儿童问题解决行为、自尊和参与犯罪同伴群体。我们将在我们的两个大型纵向调查样本中估计结构方程模型和指数随机图模型，以测试我们的理论模型的泛化性。我们的样本包含了关键概念（如养育子女、亲子互动、家庭背景和儿童结果）的共同衡量标准的核心，并提供了几个独特的优势，允许对我们的理论模型进行完整的检查。这个研究项目将对青少年犯罪、暴力和家庭动态的研究做出一些贡献。首先，我们认为，孩子的信息披露有助于父母的管教，而将管教识别为仅由父母控制的模型是不明确和有偏见的。犯罪学研究尚未将儿童代理纳入育儿模式和儿童结局。其次，我们的模型考虑了环境风险因素，如父母犯罪和监禁、儿童早期攻击和家庭暴力。通过同时检查这些因素，并探索它们是如何相互关联的，我们可以确定这些风险因素是累积的，依赖于其他风险因素（如贫困）的存在，还是相互负作用，所有这些目前都不清楚。包括这些背景变量也将允许我们测试其他犯罪学理论，如差异社会组织理论，与我们的养育模式。第三，在两个大数据集上测试我们的模型，可以更全面地了解各种风险因素，并将我们的分析扩展到不仅暴力和受害风险高，或家庭压力高，而且在种族构成和社会经济结果方面代表性不足的人群中，心理学研究处于儿童发展，育儿和问题行为研究的前沿。

This project examines how family conditions reduce the effects of other risk factors associated with childhood delinquency, violence, and victimization. Recent research on families deals extensively with the effects of child agency on parent/child interactions. To date research in criminology has yet to incorporate these insights from developmental psychology into explanations of childhood delinquency, violence, and victimization. The funding for this project is used to assemble two separate data sets (the Denver Youth Survey and the National Survey of Adolescent Health) to examine whether and how the quality of child/parent interactions leads to resiliency for children in environments where delinquency, violence and victimization might otherwise occur. The project will contribute to a greater understanding of how parenting practices can produce positive child behavioral outcomes across a wide variety of circumstances.Our specific objectives are to (1) correctly specify a dynamic model of parent-child interactions, and use it to predict child outcomes; (2) to account for the contextual and conditioning effects of family, parent, and child characteristics on parent-child interactions and child outcomes; and (3) to extend our model to predict not only youth delinquency and violence, but also victimization, child problem-solving behavior,self-esteem, and participation in delinquent peer groups. We will estimate structural equation models and exponential random graph models across our two large longitudinal survey samples to test the generalizability of our theoretical model. Our samples contain a core of common measures of key concepts such as parenting, parent-child-interactions, family contexts, and child outcomes, as well as providing several unique advantages that allow for a complete examination of our theoretical model.This research project will make several contributions to the study of delinquency, violence, and family dynamics. First, we argue that child disclosure informs parental discipline, and models that identify discipline as controlled only by parents are miss-specified and biased. Criminological research has yet to include child agency in models of parenting and child outcomes. Second, our model accounts for contextual risk factors, such as parental crime and incarceration, early child aggression, and family violence. By examining these factors simultaneously, and exploring how they are interrelated, we can determine whether these risk factors are cumulative, dependent on presence of other risk factors such as poverty, or negatively interact with one another, all of which is presently unclear. The inclusion of these contextual variables will also allow us to test other criminological theories, such as differential social organization theory, with our parenting model. Third, testing our model across two large data sets allows for a more complete look at a variety of risk factors and extends our analyses to populations that are not only high risk for violence and victimization, or family stress, but are also underrepresented, both in terms of ethnic composition and socioeconomic outcomes in psychological studies that are at the forefront of research on child development, parenting, and problem behavior.