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Abstract
This study used baseline data from the Southwest sample of the Latino Acculturation and Health Project to examine whether familism and cohesion are related to problem behaviors in a sample of Mexican and Mexican-American adolescents in the Southwest United States. This study is important to practitioners and prevention and intervention researchers because it examines buffers to problem behaviors among an increasingly at-risk population. The results confirm that familism is a powerful protective factor against aggressive behavior, conduct problems, and rule-breaking in this sample. The results draw attention to the importance of family among Mexican and Mexican-American families. Family cohesion, however, was found to be protective against conduct problems and rule-breaking but not aggressive behavior. Possible explanations for this result are discussed. Additional findings suggest that adolescents who have the ability to navigate between culture of origin and mainstream culture are also protected against some problem behaviors.
This research was supported by awards from the Centers for Disease Control's National Injury Prevention Center (R49/CCR42172 & 1K01CE000496), and by the National Institutes of Health/National Institute on Drug Abuse award funding the Southwest Interdisciplinary Research Center at Arizona State University (R-24 DA 13937).
Notes
1Along with all other predictors, we investigated the possibility that the mother education and father education variables were colinear, but found the variance inflation factor was acceptable (VIF = 1.3). We also checked whether the effects for mother's education and father's education were the same when entered in equations without the education of the other parent; these results were the same, suggesting that both variables could be included simultaneously in the model.