The relationship between acculturation and problem behavior proneness in a Hispanic youth sample: a longitudinal mediation model

This study, using secondary data analysis, examined prospectively a mediation model of the relationship between acculturation and problem behavior proneness among 330 Hispanic children and adolescents from an urban school district in the southwest region of the United States. Acculturation was predicted to have an indirect, but positive, relationship to problem behavior proneness through parental involvement and self-esteem. The results partially supported the model and indicated that parental involvement, but not self-esteem, played a significant mediational role in children's problem behavior proneness. The individual indicators of problem behavior proneness among Hispanic youth were significantly interrelated, which is consistent with problem behavior theory as conceptualized by R. Jessor (1984) and R. Jessor and S. L. Jessor (1977). Findings from this study provide implications for future research and intervention designs.     

Do Coping Styles Differ Across Sociocultural Groups? The Role of Measurement Equivalence in Making This Judgment

Cross-sociocultural group measurement equivalency is an important issue that generally has not been studied in the coping literature. Measurement equivalency of the COPE (Carver, Scheier, & Weintraub, 1989) was assessed across two sociocultural groups, a sample of 100 Anglo middle-class divorced mothers and a sample of 122 low-income Mexican American/Mexican immigrant mothers. A series of restrictive confirmatory factor analyses revealed that seven of the COPE's subscales may be measuring the same underlying construct across populations. However, scores derived from the subscales may not represent the same magnitude of the construct in these two groups. This study makes an important first step in furthering the understanding of coping strategies in low-income Mexican American/Mexican immigrant mothers. This study also illustrates the importance of testing for measurement equivalency before conducting comparative research in disparate populations.     

The psychological sense of economic hardship: measurement models, validity, and cross-ethnic equivalence for urban families

Poverty is a community stressor that disproportionally affects ethnic minority families. One aspect of programmatic research on poverty focuses on the psychological sense of economic hardship. In a study of 319 African American, European American, and Mexican American urban families, parents completed objective measures of economic status and scales of perceived economic hardship that were adapted from previous research. Measurement models identified a coherent construct of psychological sense of economic hardship that was essentially equivalent for mothers and fathers, English- and Spanish-speaking Mexican Americans, and the 3 ethnic groups. In support of the validity of this construct, relations between objective indicators of economic status and perceived economic hardship showed equivalence across these same groups.     

Stressors, quality of the child-caregiver relationship, and children's mental health problems after parental death: the mediating role of self-system beliefs

Investigated whether three self-system beliefs, fear of abandonment, coping efficacy, and self-esteem, mediated the relations of stressors and caregiver-child relationship quality with concurrent and prospective internalizing and externalizing problems in a sample of children who had experienced parental death in the previous 2.5 years. The cross-sectional sample consisted of 340 children ages 7-16 and their surviving parent/current caregiver; the longitudinal analyses employed a subset of this sample that consisted of 100 children and their parents/caregivers who were assessed at three time points. A multirater, multimethod measure of caregiver-child relationship quality and a multirater measure of children's mental health problems were used. The cross-sectional model supported a mediational relation for fear of abandonment, coping efficacy, and self-esteem. The three-wave longitudinal model showed that fear of abandonment at Time 2 mediated the relation between stressors at Time 1 and internalizing and externalizing problems at Time 3. Implications of these findings for understanding the development of mental health problems in parentally bereaved children and designing interventions for this at-risk group are discussed.     

Stressors, Quality of the Child–Caregiver Relationship, and Children's Mental Health Problems After Parental Death: The Mediating Role of Self-System Beliefs

Investigated whether three self-system beliefs, fear of abandonment, coping efficacy, and self-esteem, mediated the relations of stressors and caregiver–child relationship quality with concurrent and prospective internalizing and externalizing problems in a sample of children who had experienced parental death in the previous 2.5 years. The cross-sectional sample consisted of 340 children ages 7–16 and their surviving parent/current caregiver; the longitudinal analyses employed a subset of this sample that consisted of 100 children and their parents/caregivers who were assessed at three time points. A multirater, multimethod measure of caregiver–child relationship quality and a multirater measure of children's mental health problems were used. The cross-sectional model supported a mediational relation for fear of abandonment, coping efficacy, and self-esteem. The three-wave longitudinal model showed that fear of abandonment at Time 2 mediated the relation between stressors at Time 1 and internalizing and externalizing problems at Time 3. Implications of these findings for understanding the development of mental health problems in parentally bereaved children and designing interventions for this at-risk group are discussed.

Linking empirically based theory and evaluation: The family bereavement program

Conclusion We have illustrated how our small theory (Lipsey, 1990) of bereavement guided the development and evaluation of a preventive intervention for bereaved children. Our small theory, based on prior empirical research, enabled us to identify family processes that appeared to mediate the effects of parental death on child mental health. Our intervention was designed to attempt to change these processes. The evaluation of our experimental trial of the intervention assessed changes on these processes as well as the more distal mental health outcomes. The experimental trial showed some-what encouraging results, in terms of the program's ability to modify the warmth of the parent–child relationship and to decrease symptomatology in the adolescent children. We also obtained further empirical support for our underlying theoretical model. Finally, implications for redesign of the program were derived from assessing the adequacy of the program components to change each of the mediators in the theoretical model.Support for this research was provided by NIMH grant P5OMH39246 which is gratefully acknowledged. David R. Pillow is now at Western Psychiatric Institute, Pittsburgh; Fred Rogosch is at the University of Rochester; Janette Beals is now at University of Colorado Health Sciences Center; Kim D. Reynolds is now at the University of Alabama, Birmingham; Carl Kallgren is now at the Pennsylvania State University, at Erie; and Rafael Ramirez is now at the University of Puerto Rico.     

Family characteristics as mediators of the influence of problem drinking and multiple risk status on child mental health

Structural equation modeling was used to test a theoretical model in which family cohesion and family reframing coping were hypothesized as mediators between family drinking problems, multiple risk factors, negative life events, and child mental health (conduct disorder, depression, anxiety) in two-parent families. Family cohesion mediated the relationships of family drinking problems and negative life events to child conduct disorder and depression. Negative life events mediated the relationships of family drinking problems and family multiple risk to child conduct disorder. Family reframing coping did not function as a mediator nor was it related to child mental health when other factors were considered simultaneously. Results indicate that increasing family cohesion and reducing sources of stress within the family (negative life events) represent promising areas for interventions for children with problem-drinking parents. Work on this study was funded in part by the National Institute for Mental Health Grant 2-P50-MH39246-06 to support a Preventive Intervention Research Center. The authors gratefully acknowledge contributions made by Rita Shell, Marcia Michaels, Joanne Gersten, George Knight, and Carolyn Berg.     

Locus of Control as a Stress Moderator and Mediator in Children of Divorce

This paper examined the stress moderator and mediator effects of four dimensions of perceived control in children of divorce. The dimensions of locus of control included internal control for positive events, internal control for negative events, unknown control for positive events, and unknown control for negative events. The sample consisted of 222 children between the ages of 8 and 12 whose parents had divorced in the previous 2 years. Moderational analyses showed that unknown control for positive events interacted with negative events to predict total symptoms. Plots of the simple slopes indicated a stress buffering effect whereby the slope of negative events on symptoms was higher for high than for low levels of unknown control for positive events. Mediational analysis showed that the relations between negative events and symptoms were mediated by both unknown control for positive events and unknown control for negative events. In contrast, evidence was not found for either a stress mediational or a moderational model for perceived internal control for positive or negative events. These results suggest that unknown control beliefs may be a particularly important dimension of control for children of divorce.     

A test of the social development model during the transition to junior high with Mexican American adolescents

Mexican American adolescents have higher rates of externalizing problems than their peers from other ethnic and racial groups. To begin the process of understanding factors related to externalizing problems in this population, this study used the social development model (SDM) and prospective data across the transition to junior high school from 750 diverse Mexican American families. In addition, the authors examined whether familism values provided a protective effect for relations within the model. Results showed that the SDM worked well for this sample. As expected, association with deviant peers was the primary predictor of externalizing behaviors. There was support for a protective effect in that adolescents with higher familism values had slower rates of increase in association with deviant peers from 5th to 7th grades than those with lower familism values. Future research needs to determine whether additional culturally appropriate modifications of the SDM would increase its usefulness for Mexican American adolescents.