Excavating Culture: Disentangling Ethnic Differences From Contextual Influences in Parenting

Abstract

Historically, much of the research on parenting has not disentangled the influences of race/ethnicity, SES, and culture on family functioning and the development of children and adolescents. This special issue addresses this gap by disentangling ethnic differences in parenting behaviors from their contextual influences, thereby deepening our understanding of parenting processes in diverse families. Six members of the Parenting Section of the Study Group on Race, Culture, and Ethnicity (SGRCE) introduce and implement a novel approach toward understanding this question. The goal of this project is to study culturally related processes and the degree to which they predict parenting. An iterative process was employed to delineate the main parenting constructs (warmth, psychological and behavioral control, monitoring, communication, and self-efficacy), cultural processes, and contextual influences, and to coordinate a data analytic plan utilizing individual datasets with diverse samples to answer the research questions.

Presented as part of the Parenting Section of the Study Group on Race, Ethnicity, and Culture. Following Le, all authors are listed in alphabetical order.

Work on this project was funded in part by the National Science Foundation (346405), Pennsylvania State University, and Tufts University.

This project was presented at a Working Conference at Tufts University, April 2005, along with papers by our colleagues in the Racial Socialization and Ethnic Identity Subgroup (Diane Hughes, Deborah Johnson, James Rodriguez, Emilie Phillips Smith, Paul Spicer, and Howard Stevenson). We thank them for their contributions to this work. Portions of this project were also presented at the Society for Research on Adolescence, March 2006.

Notes

Note. w = within group comparisons within a dataset; a = multigroup comparisons within a dataset; Pinderh =  Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum ls; Pinderhughes.

∗In these cases, data are available for only specific years during the given age period.