Latent Profiles of Early and Late Adolescents’ Prosocial Behavior: Influences of Cultural and Prosocial Values

• In Event: 3-230 - Understanding Correlates and Outcomes of Prosocial Behavior Across Adolescence: The Utility of Person-Centered Approaches

Integrative Statement

Prosocial behaviors (i.e., behaviors intended to help others) have been found to be multidimensional in nature (Padilla-Walker & Carlo, 2014). Prosocial behaviors occur across a variety of situations (emotional, dire, anonymous, and compliant helping) and motivations (altruistic/selfless helping, public helping in front of others). Given these multiple dimensions possess unique correlates (Carlo et al., 2003) and have been replicated cross-culturally (McGinley et al., 2014), these substantiated forms may also be useful when investigated outside of a variable-centered framework. For example, these dimensions may facilitate the identification of latent subpopulations of prosociality.
Previous research using multidimensional prosocial behaviors in infancy have focused on helping across situations (e.g., Newton et al., 2016), yielding low, medium, and high prosocial groups. One previous study (name removed for review, 2010) integrated motivations of helping, which yielded four groups of prosociality in early adolescents: Altruistic Low-Helpers (high altruism, low situational helping), Altruistic High-Helpers (high altruism, frequent situational helping, low public helping), Public Helpers (high public helping and situational helping, lower altruism), and Average Helpers. The first goal of the current study is to determine if these profiles can be replicated in a sample of late adolescents.
Second, the current study seeks to understand whether cultural and prosocial values can meaningfully distinguish across these groups. Scholars have found that these values are linked to prosocial behaviors when using variable-centered approaches (e.g., Davis et al., 2015; Knight et al., 2016). However, these values may also inform our interpretation of latent subgroups of prosociality.
The early adolescent sample included 317 U.S. Mexican and White adolescents (50% female, M age=10.96 years). The late adolescent sample included 233 primarily White adolescents from the U.S. (70% female, M age=16.66 years). Measures included the multiple scales of the Prosocial Tendencies Measure (PTM), Mexican American Cultural Values Scale (MACV), and Prosocial Values Measure (PVM). Adolescents and mothers reported on values only for in the early adolescent sample. The older adolescents did not complete the MACV.
A latent profile analysis (LPA) on the late adolescent sample was conducted in Mplus 8.0 using the PTM subscales. In order to determine the number of latent classes, several indices were examined (see Roosa et al., 2009) across several class solutions (see Table 1); the four-class solution comparable to the early adolescent study appeared to provide the best fit to the data.
In order to examine differences across cultural and prosocial values for both early and late adolescents, one-way ANOVA tests were conducted (see Table 2). Public helpers were highest on nearly every value examined, including religiosity, materialism, acculturation, enculturation, personal achievement, familism, respect, social responsibility, emotionality, and being a good person. Altruistic high-helpers reported greater levels of prosocial values but not cultural values. Notably, later adolescents’ prosocial values were more congruent with their behavioral profiles when compared to early adolescents.
Discussion will focus on the role of values across early and late adolescence, as well as the utility of using person vs. variable-centered approaches to understand the consolidation of prosocial behaviors with social, emotional, and cognitive correlates.

Authors

• Meredith McGinley, University of Wisconsin-Parkside
  Presenting Author

• Sarah L. Pierotti, University of Missouri
  Non-Presenting Author

• Gustavo Carlo, University of Missouri
  Non-Presenting Author

• George Knight, Arizona State University
  Non-Presenting Author