PARENTING, CULTURE, NEIGHBORHOODS & ANTISOCIAL BEHAVIOR

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Too little is known about how cultural, neighborhood, and socioeconomic forces work independently and in interaction to influence family child- rearing practices. The proposed study will use culturally-anchored analytical methods to address these issues in three phases. The following questions will guide the study: 1) To what extend does cultural influence the parenting strategies families choose, independent of other contextual forces? 2) Does culture, rather than socio-economic status or neighborhood context, changes what perceived parenting strategies reduced youth anti-social behavior? 3) To what extent do both neighborhood context and culture moderate the effect of child-rearing style on antisocial behavior? The study sample consists of 7th to 12th grade White, African-American, and Latino adolescents from similar socio-economic and neighborhood contexts surveyed by the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health) (N=2,550). In the first phase, potential differences in parenting strategies used by families from these three race/ethnic groups will be explored. The extent to which distinct parenting scales emerge from factor analyses of youth reports of parenting behaviors for each ethnic group will be evaluated using both principle axis factor analysis and multi-sample confirmatory factor analysis. Exploratory cluster analysis of the resulting parenting scales will then allow potentially unique holistic patterns of parenting behaviors to emerge for each group. The second phase will examine the relationship between the parenting profiles revealed in the first phase and adolescent antisocial behavior for families of each ethnic group, controlling for factors such as youth gender, age, and grade, parent age, education, socio-economic status, and family structure. In the third phase, the potential moderating roles of both neighborhood poverty and race/ethnicity on the relationship between the parenting profiles and youth antisocial behavior will be considered, controlling for the same factors.