The purpose of this randomized experimental design was to determine the impact of a culturally adapted family-based intervention program on parenting styles. A secondary purpose was to determine the impact of cultural factors, biculturalism and familism, on the parenting styles of parents who participated in the family intervention, as compared to those who did not participate in the intervention. The sample consisted mostly of Haitian parents whose youth, ages 13-17, were involved in the juvenile justice system in South Florida. Twenty-one parents were randomly assigned to the intervention group (n = 15) and comparison group, or standard of care (n = 6). This study was a substudy of a larger scale study that was conducted at a major university in South Florida. Participants in the family-based intervention group received an evidence-based intervention that was adapted to their cultural needs and language preferences. The intervention lasted between 3-4 months. Participants in the comparison group were those in the standard of care, or treatment as usual group, who were referred to community-based organizations for counseling services. A pretest-posttest design was used to examine the effects of the culturally adapted intervention on parenting styles and familism. Parenting styles were measured using the Parenting Styles and Dimensions Questionnaire (PSDQ, Robinson et al., 1995) and familism was measured using the Attitudinal Familism Scale (Lugo Steidel & Contreras, 2003). T-test analyses were used to determine statistical significance of the variables and gain scores were calculated for the intervention group and comparison group. Pearson’s r correlation coefficient was also used to explore any significant relationships between the dependent variables, parenting styles and familism, and parenting styles and biculturalism. Biculturalism was measured using the Bicultural Involvement Questionnaire (Szapocznik et al., 1980). / Includes bibliography. / Dissertation (PhD)--Florida Atlantic University, 2021. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

Parenting, one of the most complex and fulfilling roles for most human beings creates not only a sense of responsibility, but also emotions with different meanings that contribute to the level of satisfaction that parents perceive from their parental role. Factors, other than socio-economic ones, create differences in the way people parent. And individuals from other cultural traditions may bring different values to their parenting practices. In an effort to find commonalities and differences in parenting and trying to put them in perspective in order to improve the interventions aimed to help parent-child relationships, this study proposed to investigate the relationships, this study proposed to investigate the relationship between mothering strategies and maternal satisfaction among three different ethnic groups of at-risk mothers: Latin Americans, Afro Americans, and Anglo Americans. The Latin American group reported supporting a lower use of physical punishment when disciplining a child than its counterparts the Afro American and the Anglo American groups. All three groups of mothers supported the use of reason as a means of disciplining when mothering their child. Most of the participants supported praising their children as a way of mothering. And, the majority of them disagreed with the use of permissive ways of mothering their children. The results from regression procedures suggested that ethnic group membership and the use of reason were the best predictors of maternal satisfaction. These results are discussed as well as implications for clinical practice. / Master of Science

Guided by Ogbu's cultural-ecological model of human development, this comparative study offers a comprehensive and explicit way of conceptualizing and measuring parenting within the cultural context. Multiple hypotheses are generated for the cross-cultural comparison of parenting styles in Asian Americans and European Americans. The study uses the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health survey data collected from a nationally representative sample of adolescents from grades 7 to 11. Logistic regression, ordered logit, and OLS regression models are employed to analyze ethnicity effects on parenting characteristics and adolescent competencies separately, adding adolescent gender, age, and parent education level as statistical controls. This study explains why family-based and individual-based parenting styles are culturally appropriate for competence acquisition in Asian-American and European-American families respectively. Findings of this study suggest that Asian parenting is largely motivated by the welfare of the family rather than the individual's needs. This pattern is seen in the high emphasis on education, different parental control levels over various behavior domains, characteristics of parental warmth and school involvement, and the way parents approach their adolescents. Greatly influenced by their cultural values about competencies necessary for success, Asian-American parents apparently inculcate the sense of filial obligation in adolescents with an emphasis on school success. European-American parents, on the other hand, develop the quality of self-expression in adolescents with an emphasis on self-esteem. Family-based parenting may be more advantageous to academic and behavioral competencies while individual-based parenting is relatively more effective for psychological adjustments. However, adolescents from both groups score reasonably well over measures of all competence variables. Thus, they may be all considered competent within their cultural contexts, with their differences echoing the fundamental diversity between the two parenting styles. This study presents some challenges to the traditional way of understanding and judging Asian parenting. A more complete scientific understanding of Asian Parenting would be useful for explaining competence acquisition in Asian-American adolescents. / Graduation date: 2003