RURAL COMMUNITIES, FAMILY PROCESSES, AND CHILD OUTCOMES

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The proposed study will examine the manner in which community characteristics, family processes, and peer affiliations combine to influence child adjustment through their impact on concurrent schedules of reinforcement, perceptions of self, attributional style, and beliefs about relationships. Primary consideration will be given to three dimensions of child adjustment: conduct problems, psychological distress/disorder, and school performance. A sample of roughly 1700 families will be selected from economically depressed communities in Iowa and Georgia. All of the families will have a 5th grade target child. We will include roughly an equal number of White and African- American families. Although in general we expect the impact of community, family, and peer factors on child adjustment to be similar regardless of the child's ethnicity, we do expect some important group differences. First, given the significance of the church in African- American communities, we expect that family religious involvement is a more potent moderator of community disadvantage for Black than White children. Second, living in a disadvantaged community is likely to increase ethnic identification and system blaming among African-American youth. As a consequence, we expect that community disadvantage reduces the self-esteem of White more than Black children, while operating to increase delinquency more among Black than White children.