Poster #63 - Interparental Conflict and Child Maladjustment: a Moderated-Mediation Analysis of Family Race/Ethnicity and Emotional Insecurity

• In Event: Poster Session 14

Abstract

There is a pressing need for representation of minoritized families in empirical research on family processes such as interparental conflict. Research has shown that children exposed to interparental conflict that is hostile, poorly resolved, and involves the child is especially harmful and can lead to child adjustment problems (Grych, Seid, & Fincham, 1992). Additionally, consistent with Emotional Security Theory (EST; Davies & Cummings, 1994), research indicates broadly that a child’s emotional security is a mediator between exposure to interparental conflict and child adjustment outcomes. However, there are mixed results, in the limited amount of literature, regarding what type of effect race/ethnicity may have on the relationship between interparental conflict and child maladjustment (i.e., attenuate (McLoyd, 2001) or strengthen (Assari et al., 2021)). Therefore, this study investigated a moderated mediation model examining the role of family race/ethnicity and child emotional insecurity on the relationship between interparental conflict and child maladjustment (Figure 1).Participants included N = 280 families (141 female children; 28% racially/ethnically minoritized families, 72% non-racially/ethnically minoritized families) enrolled in wave 4 (of 6) of the Me and My Family Project. The average age of the child enrolled at this wave was 13.10 +/- 0.53. Parents completed the 10-item O’Leary Porter Scale (OPS; Porter & O’Leary, 1980) to capture the amount of overt conflict the child was exposed to. Children reported on emotional insecurity using the Security in the Interparental Subsystem measure (SIS; Davies et al., 2002) and their adjustment using the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ; Goodman, 1997). A family’s racially/ethnically minoritized status was determined by whether at least one parent identified as Hispanic or Latino and/or identified as any race besides White. Although the moderated mediation was not significant, there was a significant indirect effect of interparental conflict on child maladjustment through child emotional insecurity, suggesting a mediation effect (mother: b= 0.09, 95th percentile CI [0.03, 0.17]; father: b = 0.07, 95th percentile CI [0.015, 0.14). Interestingly, for fathers’ report on conflict, there was a marginally significant interaction between emotional insecurity and minoritized family status for the b-path (b = 0.07, p = 0.052). This moderation trend shows that the relationship between emotional insecurity and child maladjustment varied at low vs. high levels of emotional insecurity (Figure 2). This result was not replicated for mothers’ report on conflict. Results suggest that children from racially/ethnically minoritized families may have greater adjustment problems when they have high, but not low, levels of emotional insecurity. These findings suggest that high emotional insecurity within the family subsystem may serve as a risk for children from racially/ethnically minoritized families in comparison to their non-minoritized family counterparts. This finding could inform interventions that may need to be tailored for dynamics specific to families from racially/ethnically minoritized backgrounds.

Authors

• Melissa Hall, University of Notre Dame
  Presenting Author

• Kathleen Nanette Bergman, University of Notre Dame

• Patrick Davies, University of Rochester

• E. Mark Cummings, University of Notre Dame