Individual Submission Summary
Share...

Direct link:

Early adolescent temperament and indicators of positive youth development: a cross-cultural comparison

Thu, March 21, 2:15 to 3:45pm, Baltimore Convention Center, Floor: Level 3, Room 313

Integrative Statement

As the Positive Youth Development perspective continues to gain ground, increased emphasis has been placed on strength-based conceptions within the developmental literature and the potential for adaptive plasticity during the transition to adolescence (Sanders et al., 2015). Within this framework, prosocial behavior and well-being have emerged as promotive factors in the context of normative development and protective factors that buffer the association between adverse life experiences (Taylor et al., 2017). Similarly, previous research has pointed to culturally-related ecological, socialization and individual-level predictors that may account for between-group and within-group differences in positive youth outcomes. These range from the influence of more distal factors (e.g., individualism-collectivism; Greenfield & Cocking, 2014) to individual differences at the proximal level (e.g., temperamental processes including emotional reactivity, cognitive processing, approach/ withdrawal tendencies; Moreira et al., 2015). Although significant research has explored how temperament may predispose a child to “high-risk” conditions or development of psychopathology (Buil et al., 2017) the temperament underpinnings of positive development, as well as the influence of culture, remain largely unexplored areas.

Employing data from an ongoing multinational longitudinal study, the goals of the proposed study are two-fold: 1) determine the extent to which selected measurement instruments (Early Adolescent Temperament Questionnaire, Prosocial Behavior Scale, and EPOCH Well-Being Measure; Capaldi & Rothbart, 1992; Kern et al., 2016; Pastorelli et al., 1997) allow for meaningful comparisons across diverse population groups and 2) gain a more nuanced and contextually-sensitive understanding of positive indicators of development during the transition to adolescence. An initial secondary analysis has provided preliminary evidence of ethnic youth differences within the U.S. sample. Results of a multigroup confirmatory factor analysis revealed an identifiable structure for prosocial behavior that was used to differentiate among adolescents from differing ethnic groups (European American and Hispanic) once noninvariant items were removed. Additionally, estimation of bivariate correlations showed a significantly different pattern of covariation between prosocial behavior and total well-being, whereby the strength of the association was greater for Hispanic compared to European American youth. These findings point to the importance of adopting a culturally-sensitive lens in the study of positive indicators of development. Next, we will extend analyses to existing data on another ~900 11-15yr olds in nine additional countries in Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and South America, that are part of the same longitudinal study. Prior to conducting analyses aimed at identifying distinct patterns in the means for and covariation between temperament, prosocial behavior, and well-being, tests for cross-group invariance will be performed with structural equation modeling in order to examine conceptual and psychometric (configural, metric, scalar and functional) data equivalence. Given cross-cultural studies often presume universality of meaning and generalizability of measurement instrumentation, it is important to prioritize the question of whether or not the instrumentation provides a valid basis for making group comparisons. Therefore, the proposed study takes a closer look at the measurement equivalence in an effort to increase confidence in attributing any differences detected across the culturally diverse research settings to actual group differences in the underlying constructs.

Authors