Poster #133 - Adolescent and Caregiver Reports of Parenting in an Urban African American Sample

• In Event: 2-055 - Poster Session 06
  In Poster Session: PS 06 Section - Parenting & Parent-Child Relationships

Integrative Statement

Parenting measures require further research on their psychometric properties. Agreement among informants is useful information helping to establish the reliability and validity of measures and frequently missing from research on parenting (Hurley, Huscroft-D’Angelo, Trout, Griffith, & Epstein, 2014). There also is need for research using well-validated measurement techniques of parenting among diverse families, including African Americans living in low income, urban neighborhoods. To address these topics, our study explored caregiver-adolescent agreement on the Parenting Interview, a 52-item, behaviorally-based, measure that asks participants to rate the frequency at which each specific behavior is performed by the caregiver. Caregiver- and adolescent-reports on the frequency of behaviors used make up the subscales of parental warmth (“My parent comforts me when I am upset”), demandingness (“We have very strict rules in our family”) and corporal punishment (“I spank my child”). To compare reports given by 48 African American youth-caregiver dyads, the three parenting domains were analyzed by using Campbell and Fiske’s (1959) multitrait-multimethod matrix model.

Results indicated that both caregiver- and adolescent-reports of each parenting dimension demonstrate adequate reliability, consistent or somewhat improved compared to other commonly used parenting measures (DeVellis, 1991; Hurley et al., 2014; Nunnally & Bernstein, 1994; Figure 1). Although similar to reliability statistics of other parenting measures, caregiver-reported demandingness demonstrated poorer reliability than our other subscales –possibly due to the multifaceted nature of providing clear and consistent rules and limits in this urban, African American and teenage sample –and is in need of further examination.

Caregiver- and adolescent-reports correlated at a level small in magnitude, suggesting that the parenting behaviors reported by caregivers and by their adolescent children were related, yet unique. Potential moderators of caregiver and adolescent agreement (e.g. child age, gender, behavior problems, caregiver age, education, income) were examined and found not to be associated with differences in parent and adolescent reports. A unique group was identified, namely youth who reported caregiver use of corporal punishment when the caregiver denied it, and was compared to youth who reported similar or less corporal punishment than their caregivers. T-tests revealed that this distinct group of families have poorer agreement on warmth and demandingness compared to the rest of our sample (Table 1).

Caregiver-reports of warmth were not correlated significantly with demandingness or corporal punishment, suggesting that these constructs were orthogonal and supporting divergent validity. However, caregiver-reported parent demandingness and corporal punishment use were shared some variance; caregivers who are high in demandingness are also more likely to use corporal punishment. Adolescent-reported demandingness was positively correlated with both warmth and corporal punishment, suggesting shared method variance in adolescents’ perceptions of their parents’ behaviors.

Taken together, these results indicate promising psychometric utility in urban African American samples for this behaviorally-based measure of adolescent parenting which warrants further study. It also suggests that caregiver- and adolescent-reports of parenting behaviors differ, perhaps moderated by differential reporting of physical punishment. Future research should explore this and other potential moderators of agreement as well as how youth and caregiver report may differentially relate to youth outcomes.

Authors

• Kelsey J Sala-Hamrick, Wayne State University
  Presenting Author

• Yi Tak Tsang, Wayne State University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Bridget Murphy, Wayne State University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Marilyn Franklin, Wayne State University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Douglas Barnett, Wayne State University
  Non-Presenting Author