Ellen E. Pinderhuhges, Kenneth A. Dodge, John E. Bates, Gregory S. Pettit, Arnaldo Zelli

Published by the American Psychology Association

"Discipline Responses Influences of Parents' Socioeconomic Status, Ethnicity, Beliefs About Parenting, Stress, and Cognitive-Emotional Processes"

In the September, 2000 "Journal of Family Psychology", several hypotheses relating to Parental discipline practices that are integral in theories of children's socialization, are explored. Many parents' use of physical punishment with their child is of special interest, but is not pertaining to the child's best interest. Numerous theories play a role for physical punishment in the development of antisocial behavior in children. This study tested direct and indirect contributions of socioeconomic status to discipline responses, direct and indirect contributions of ethnicity to discipline responses. The study, part of a longitudinal investigation of child development, used cross-sectional data. Parents' responses to multiple hypothetical vignettes involving child misbehavior, were the measure of discipline responses.

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disciplines which were cross-situational variables of severity of punishment and physical punishment. The independent variables were parent ethnicity, gender of parent, and gender of child. Further analyses revealed a main effect due to parent ethnicity on three variables. Relative to African Americans, European American parents made fewer hostile attributions about their child. It seemed that less worried about their child's future and endorsed less severe punishment. Analyses of covariance were conducted on the two actual discipline variables. This time parent ethnicity, parent sex, and child sex were used as independent variables. Parent ethnicity yielded a main effect on both measures of actual discipline. Relative to African American parents, European American parents were rated by interviewers as using less harsh punishment.

ipline responses and values and the child's behavior. (1) The parent interviewer was trained over a 4-week period that included reading a detailed procedure manual, observing interviews by a master interviewer, and conducting interviews with a supervisor present. Interviewers were trained to a reliability of 80% or higher before they began to collect data on their own. A trained observer who either accompanied the interviewer for or listened to tapes of 56 randomly selected interviews obtained independent reliability assessments.

In this study, two models hypothesizing direct and mediated relations between socioeconomic status and discipline responses and between ethnicity and discipline responses were tested. Findings of SEM analyses provided some support for these models. After discussing implications of these findings, we focus attention on specific constructs within the models. Significant direct and mediated relations were found between socioeconomic status and discipline responses. As hypothesized, low-income parents tended to endorse more harsh discipline responses in part because they held stronger beliefs about the value of spanking, and they experienced higher levels of stress. In turn, their

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Approximate Word count = 1432
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page double spaced)