Poster #180 - The Role of Maternal Religious Socialization and Warmth in Muslim-American Adolescents’ Connectedness through their Identities

• In Event: 1-005 - Poster Session 01
  In Poster Session: PS 01 Section - Race, Ethnicity, Culture, Context

Integrative Statement

Connectedness refers to bidirectional exchanges and positive bonds between the individual and peers, family, school, and community (Lerner, 2004). Adolescents’ connectedness and engagement in their community has been found to promote positive development and buffer from risk trajectories (Foster et al., 2017). Connectedness is particularly important for minority youth because it can contribute to positive feelings and psychological adjustment by providing youth with a sense of belonging and affirmation (Umana- Taylor et al., 2012). Accumulating evidence indicates the critical role of parents in promoting positive youth development (e.g., Wang et al., 2017), but studies examining culturally-relevant parenting practices, such as maternal religious socialization, are scant (Costigan et al., 2017). Maternal religious socialization (MRS) includes attempts to teach children about their cultural history, values and practices (Hughes et al., 2006), and can promote minority youth’s positive ingroup identity and outcomes, including connectedness (Evans et al., 2012). However, although maternal warmth (MW) has been found to enhance the effects of positive parenting practices on child outcomes (Newsom et al., 2008), the potential moderating role of MW on the associations between MRS and minority youths’ identity development has been unexplored. Additionally, limited work has examined whether religious socialization may affect positive outcomes through religious minority adolescents’ multiple-group (religious Muslim and national American) identities. Thus, the present study examined whether: (a) Muslim-American adolescents’ religious and national (American) identities mediated the associations between MRS and connectedness; and (b) MW moderated these mediated associations.
Participants included 210 Muslim-American adolescents (13-18-year-old, Mage=16.72, SDage=1.55; 58.5% female). Participants reported their MRS (Hughes & Johnson, 2001), MW (Nelson et al., 2001), Muslim and American identity (Phinney & Ong, 2007), and sense of connectedness to peers, school and family (Geldhoff et al., 2013).
Moderated mediation analyses were conducted using Process in SPSS (Figure 1) and indicated that MRS had a significant positive indirect effect on connectedness to school through increased Muslim identity, and this association was moderated by MW. Specifically, MRS predicted greater connectedness to school through Muslim identity at mean and high levels of MW, but not at low levels of MW. In contrast, the indirect effect of MRS on connectedness through American identity was not significant and MW did not moderate these indirect effects. However, greater national identity was associated with more connectedness to school and peers.
Our results indicated that religious and cultural messages from mothers were positively linked to Muslim-American adolescents’ greater sense of connectedness to their school through greater religious identification, but only when mothers displayed high warmth, perhaps because maternal warmth may provide a supportive context that promotes adolescents’ acceptance and internalization of mothers’ socialization messages (Hernández et al., 2014; Kang, 2010). Although MRS was not associated with Muslim-American adolescents’ identification with the mainstream American group, both their Muslim and American identities were differentially related to greater social connectedness, indicating that adolescents’ sense-of-belonging promote more positive social bonds in their environment (Williams, et al., 2014). These findings highlight the complex interplay in socialization forces that promote religious minority youths’ social connectedness.

Authors

• Hatice Gursoy, Marmara University
  Presenting Author

• Merve Balkaya, University of Maryland, Baltimore County
  Non-Presenting Author

• Salih Barman, University of Maryland, Baltimore County
  Non-Presenting Author

• Charissa S. L. Cheah, University of Maryland, Baltimore County
  Non-Presenting Author