Seeing eye to eye? Parent and youth social status agreement and youth psychosocial development

• In Event: Poster Session 06
  In Poster Session: PS 06 Topic - Family Context & Processes

Abstract

As youths transition from childhood to adolescence, they become increasingly aware of how the social and economic conditions of their family compare to others (Diemer et al., 2013; Flanagan et al., 2014; Goodman et al., 2001). During this transition, youths and their parents may reflect similarities or differences in their perceptions of subjective social status (i.e., an individual’s perceived location in the socioeconomic structure), theorized to relate to their families’ respective economic conditions (e.g., household income and parental education) and psychosocial factors (e.g., hardship, stress) (Jones et al., 2018). The social causation hypothesis posits that the social-cognitive changes that occur during the transition to adolescence and the social awareness of family income and subjective social status may be associated with being aware of social position (e.g., not only the lack of access to resources, but also less access relative to others) (Reis, 2013). Extending this formative work, there may be family processes and parental practices that amplify or shield youths’ understanding of their relative social position. For example, some prior research on adultification, youth hardship, and shielding suggests youths growing up in low-income households, in which needing to understand financial knowledge and assume adult roles and responsibilities within their family networks is normative, has significant implications for family processes and the development of said youths (Burton, 2007). Less is known about these dynamics in middle-income households. Building upon this work, the concordance or discordance between youth and parent reports of subjective social status and what predicts the relationship between parental and youth perceived social status is underexplored.
Our current study has two aims. First, we examined the concordance between parent and youth reports of subjective social status and how concordance varies by different levels of socioeconomic status (SES). Second, we examined how family processes, youth reports of financial/material hardship, adultification, and shielding relate to parent-youth subjective social status concordance. To address these questions, we analyzed data from an ongoing 9-month longitudinal study of racially and socioeconomically diverse parent-youth dyads (ages 14–16 years; N=85). For our first aim, we explored mean differences of the concordance between parent and youth reports of subjective social status by creating a difference score, where zero indicates complete concordance, negative one to positive six indicates they had discordance. We then tested whether concordance varied across levels of household income and parental education. For our second aim, we correlated concordance with youth reports of hardship, adultification, and financial shielding. For our first aim, preliminary results revealed significant differences between parent and youth endorsement levels of social status, in which youth and parents in middle-income and higher education families reported more concordance than youth in low-income families. For our second aim, we did not find psychosocial factors (i.e., hardship, adultification, and financial shielding) to be significantly correlated with the concordance or discordance between parent-youth subjective social status ratings. This study has important implications for extending frameworks to include youth perspectives for developmental theories on psychosocial development and family processes.

Authors

• Nabila Jamal-Orozco, University of Pittsburgh
  Presenting Author

• Elizabeth Votruba-Drzal, University of Pittsburgh
  Non-Presenting Author

• Portia Miller, University of Pittsburgh
  Non-Presenting Author

• Jamie L Hanson, University of Pittsburgh
  Non-Presenting Author

• Daniesha S. Hunter-Rue, University of Pittsburgh
  Non-Presenting Author

• Kendra Whitfield, University of Pittsburgh
  Non-Presenting Author