Doctoral Dissertation Research: Parenting, Family Communication, and Children's Behavior

University Of Washington, Seattle WA

Investigators

Abstract

This project examines how family conditions reduce the effects of other risk factors associated with childhood delinquency, violence, and victimization. Recent research on families deals extensively with the effects of child agency on parent/child interactions. To date research in criminology has yet to incorporate these insights from developmental psychology into explanations of childhood delinquency, violence, and victimization. The funding for this project is used to assemble two separate data sets (the Denver Youth Survey and the National Survey of Adolescent Health) to examine whether and how the quality of child/parent interactions leads to resiliency for children in environments where delinquency, violence and victimization might otherwise occur. The project will contribute to a greater understanding of how parenting practices can produce positive child behavioral outcomes across a wide variety of circumstances. Our specific objectives are to (1) correctly specify a dynamic model of parent-child interactions, and use it to predict child outcomes; (2) to account for the contextual and conditioning effects of family, parent, and child characteristics on parent-child interactions and child outcomes; and (3) to extend our model to predict not only youth delinquency and violence, but also victimization, child problem-solving behavior,self-esteem, and participation in delinquent peer groups. We will estimate structural equation models and exponential random graph models across our two large longitudinal survey samples to test the generalizability of our theoretical model. Our samples contain a core of common measures of key concepts such as parenting, parent-child-interactions, family contexts, and child outcomes, as well as providing several unique advantages that allow for a complete examination of our theoretical model. This research project will make several contributions to the study of delinquency, violence, and family dynamics. First, we argue that child disclosure informs parental discipline, and models that identify discipline as controlled only by parents are miss-specified and biased. Criminological research has yet to include child agency in models of parenting and child outcomes. Second, our model accounts for contextual risk factors, such as parental crime and incarceration, early child aggression, and family violence. By examining these factors simultaneously, and exploring how they are interrelated, we can determine whether these risk factors are cumulative, dependent on presence of other risk factors such as poverty, or negatively interact with one another, all of which is presently unclear. The inclusion of these contextual variables will also allow us to test other criminological theories, such as differential social organization theory, with our parenting model. Third, testing our model across two large data sets allows for a more complete look at a variety of risk factors and extends our analyses to populations that are not only high risk for violence and victimization, or family stress, but are also underrepresented, both in terms of ethnic composition and socioeconomic outcomes in psychological studies that are at the forefront of research on child development, parenting, and problem behavior.