Profiles of U.S. Mexican Early Adolescents’ Prosocial Values and their Relations to Prosocial Behaviors

• In Event: 3-136 - A Multicultural Perspective on Values and Positive Developmental Outcomes

Integrative Statement

Values have been identified as key contributors to moral development and prosocial behavior (Aquino & Reed, 2002; Grusec & Goodnow; 1994; Hardy & Carlo, 2005). For example, Grusec and Goodnow’s (1994) moral internalization model suggests that value socialization and children’s moral value internalization is related to moral action, such as prosocial behavior. However, the existence of measures that tap into culture-specific prosocial values and subsequent research is limited. In addition, prior research on values has often utilized a variable-centered approach to study values separately. The Prosocial Values Measure (PVM; Carlo et al., 2009) is one measure that can be used to address these gaps. Measures like this, which consider multiple values, lend themselves to using a person-centered approach to see how various values work simultaneously to relate to unique forms of prosocial behavior.
The goals of this study were to: a) investigate patterns of prosocial values among U.S. Mexican early adolescents; b) examine how profile membership relates to six unique forms of prosocial behavior; and c) explore how profile membership relates to select socioemotional and sociocognitive correlates.
Participants were 207 U.S. Mexican early adolescents from Arizona (M age = 10.9 years; SD = .83; 50% girls). Participants completed self-report measures of: a) five prosocial values (respect, familism, religiosity, personalismo, and civic responsibility; PVM; Carlo et al., 2009); b) six forms of prosocial behavior (public, emotional, dire, altruistic, compliant, and anonymous; PTM-R; Carlo et al., 2003); c) empathic concern and perspective taking (IRI; Davis, 1980); and d) prosocial moral reasoning (PROM; Carlo et al., 1992).
Descriptive statistics and correlations among variables are shown in Table 1. Latent Profile Analysis (LPA) was conducted in Mplus (Muthén & Muthén, 2010) to identify profiles based on the five prosocial values from the PVM. Results indicated the two-profile solution best fit the data, and we identified these profiles as Moderate Prosocial Values and High Prosocial Values. There were significant group mean differences on all prosocial values, with the High Prosocial Values group scoring significantly higher than the Moderate Prosocial Values group (see Table 2).
Further analyses looked at how the profiles differed based on six forms of prosocial behavior, as well as empathic concern, perspective taking, and prosocial moral reasoning (see Table 2). Results indicated that there were significant group mean differences on all correlate variables except for prosocial moral reasoning. The High Prosocial Values group scored significantly higher than the Moderate Prosocial Values group on public, emotional, dire, compliant, and anonymous prosocial behavior but lower on altruistic prosocial behavior. The High Prosocial Values group also reported significantly higher values on measures of empathic concern and perspective taking than the Moderate Prosocial Values group.
Discussion will focus on the importance of these values in promoting prosocial behavior, as well as the study of prosocial values and prosocial behaviors as multidimensional constructs. We will also discuss the benefits of using a person-centered approach to analyze these relations and the finding that a Low Prosocial Values group was not identified.

Authors

• Sarah L. Pierotti, University of Missouri
  Presenting Author

• Gustavo Carlo, University of Missouri
  Non-Presenting Author

• George Knight, Arizona State University
  Non-Presenting Author