Poster #97 - Mexican-Origin Family Members’ Unique and Shared Perspectives on Familism Values: Links with Sibling Relationship Quality

• In Event: 1-115 - Poster Session 03
  In Poster Session: PS 03 Section - Family Context & Processes

Integrative Statement

Mexican-origin families represent a large and rapidly growing segment of the US population (U.S. Census Bureau, 2017), and strongly endorse family-oriented values. Familism refers to individuals’ identification with and attachment to family, and emphasizes a sense of responsibility, support, and obligations to family (Sabogal et al., 1987). Prior work has documented the protective effects of familism (Fuligni et al., 1999). Much of this work focuses on relationships with parents, and less is known about how familism values are linked to other relationships, including with siblings (Updegraff et al., 2005). Sisters and brothers are central in the lives of youth: Sibling support and intimacy in adolescence are predictors of health and well-being, and sibling conflict is linked to adjustment problems (McHale et al., 2012). However, research on familism’s linkage to family functioning has largely ignored a key complexity of family systems – namely, that family members’ perspectives of familism values may converge but also diverge from one another. Accordingly, to advance understanding of the family system and familism values, our study addressed two goals. First, we assessed the extent to which the familism values of mothers, fathers and older and younger siblings were unique versus shared across all four family members using Multitrait-Multimethod Confirmatory Factor Analysis (MTMM-CFA; Jager et al., 2012). Second, we tested how siblings’ unique and shared perspectives of familism values are related to sibling intimacy and conflict.
Participants were mothers, fathers, and two siblings from 246 Mexican American families. Participation criteria were that families had a seventh grader with at least one older adolescent sibling, a biological mother and a biological/step father, all living together; 100% of mothers and 93% of fathers were of Mexican origin; and 100% of fathers were employed for at least 20 hours/week. Older siblings averaged 15.48 (SD = 1.57) and younger siblings, 12.55 (SD = .60) years. Parents and siblings rated their familism values using the three subscales of the Mexican-American Cultural Values Scale (Knight et al., 2010): Familism Support, Familism Obligations, and Familism Referent. Youth also rated sibling conflict and intimacy; both siblings’ ratings of each relationship dimension were averaged for the analyses.
To address Goal 1, we conducted MTMM-CFAs. The best fitting model (Figure 1) included a shared family perspective for only the Familism Support subscale and a unique perspective for each of the four family members (all 3 subscales loaded on a single factor for each family member). For Goal 2 (Table 2), results of regressions predicting sibling relationship intimacy and conflict from shared family and youth’s unique perspectives on familism values indicated that both siblings’ unique perspectives of familism as well as the family support perspective were positively associated with sibling intimacy, but only younger siblings’ unique perspective was (negatively) associated with sibling conflict. In other words, whereas both siblings’ unique perspectives and the family perspective predicted intimacy, only younger siblings’ unique perspective predicted conflict. These findings have implications for family programs geared toward Mexican-origin families given prior research documenting the protective effects of strong familism values for positive family relationships.

Authors

• Jenny Padilla, Arizona State University
  Presenting Author

• Justin Jager, Arizona State University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Kimberly Updegraff, Arizona State University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Susan M. McHale, The Pennsylvania State University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Adriana Umaña-Taylor, Harvard University
  Non-Presenting Author