System Justification, Mental Health, and Behavior Among Disadvantaged Mothers and Their Children

Abstract

Integrating social psychological research with work in child development, this study explored relationships between system justification (Jost & Banaji, 1994), maternal mental health, and child externalizing behavior among low-income immigrants and racial/ethnic minorities. Dominican, Mexican, and African American families (N = 239) were assessed when children were 14, 24, and 36 months old. Structural equation modeling was used to explore longitudinal relationships between maternal system justification and mental health and associations with child behavior. Earlier mental health was negatively related to later system justification and system justification was negatively related to children's externalizing behavior. Implications for system justification theory, child development, and immigration are discussed.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This research was supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health under the Ruth L. Kirchstein National Research Service Award (#F31MH082535) and by the American Psychological Foundation of the American Psychological Association under the Elizabeth Munsterberg Koppitz Fellowship. I especially thank Hiro Yoshikawa, John Jost, and Larry Aber for their considerable support of this work, and Diane Hughes and Carola Suarez-Orozco for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this article.

Notes

¹The 56 Chinese participants were dropped from the study as it was found that the majority of their infants were sent back to China to be raised by family members until they reached school age. This common practice allowed undocumented Chinese immigrant parents to work 72-hr weeks to pay back large sums of money owed to traffickers (Yoshikawa, 2011).

²Follow-up analyses supported the assumption that longitudinal data in this sample was missing at random. We compared respondents with missing and nonmissing data for each of the longitudinal missing data patterns found in our study across a range of characteristics, including racial/ethnic background, education, income, employment, years in the United States, maternal and child age, child gender, maternal marital status, and total adults and children in the household. No significant differences in these characteristics were found for any longitudinal missing data pattern.

³Two items on the original scale, “Everyone has a fair shot at wealth and happiness” and “Society is set up so that people usually get what they deserve,” were dropped from the current study because the results of measurement invariance analyses (described next) suggested they did not measure system justification in the same way across study waves or racial/ethnic groups.

⁴These responses were recoded into the next highest category to better approximate a normal distribution at the item level for measurement invariance analyses.

Note. CFI = comparative fit index; TLI = Tucker-Lewis index; RMSEA = root mean square error of approximation; SRMR = standardized root mean square residual.

^† p < .10. *p < .05. **p < .01. ***p < .001.

⁵Equality constraints were imposed on the residual variances and covariances across waves for the sake of parsimony and did not result in a significant deterioration in model fit.

⁶The fact that an increase in system justifying beliefs does not ultimately lead to a decrease in psychological distress does not undermine the coping explanation. Theoretical and empirical work on coping makes a distinction between coping mechanisms and their subsequent outcomes, conceptualizing coping as any effort to manage demands and stressors, regardless of the success of that effort (Folkman, 1984).

⁷Because racial/ethnic group membership is confounded with immigrant status in this study, to try to further test this possibility, I explored the relationship of immigrant status (foreign vs. native born) in the one ethnic group in which there was some variation: Dominicans. About 80% of Dominican mothers in the sample are immigrant and the rest are native born. The results of this analysis support my interpretation of the findings. Within this group, immigrant mothers endorsed significantly higher system justification (M = 2.58) across all waves of the study than native born (M = 2.31), t(81) = −2.82, p = .006.