Parental psychological control in Mexican immigrant families: A culturally sensitive measure and mechanism

I aim to become an independent researcher who studies parenting in diverse cultures via multiple methods and who builds, tests, and evaluates culturally sensitive preventive interventions for ethnically diverse families. This project will build on my expertise in parental psychological control (conceptualization, measurement, and

mechanisms), my skills in quantitative data analyses, and my experience with questionnaire data collection. Additional training in family observations and interviews and solidifying my expertise in Latinx parenting (K99) will equip me to test my culturally sensitive mechanisms of PPC longitudinally (R00) and develop and evaluate

culturally sensitive preventive interventions for culturally diverse families (future R01). My efforts to promote equity based on my background—coming from poverty, being a first-generation college student, having recovered from physical disabilities, and being a woman—make me eligible for the Maximizing Opportunities for

Scientific and Academic Independent Careers program to enhance workforce diversity. Parental psychological control (PPC)—a set of intrusive parenting behaviors that emotionally manipulate children to obey their parents—has been associated with diverse negative developmental outcomes reported in more

than 770 papers. However, the lack of culturally sensitive measures and of the mechanisms of PPC limits our understanding of if and how PPC impairs children’s development in diverse cultures. Although behaviors ethnically diverse families consider to be intrusive may differ from what white American families consider intrusive,

this cultural variability of intrusiveness has been neglected in the PPC research literature. Drawing from my Two Facet Parental Psychological Control conceptual framework, I will measure what Mexican immigrant families believe to be intrusive (K99). Drawing from the Family Stress Model and the Integrative model for studying

children’s developmental competencies of minority children, I will test a culturally sensitive mechanism of PPC in a longitudinal study (R00) with my refined PPC questionnaire from K99. In the K99 phase, I will observe and interview families and administer my PPC questionnaire to families to adapt

my questionnaire to Mexican immigrant families. I will include fathers, who have been excluded from most PPC research, and adopt mixed methods to use interview and observation results to generate culturally sensitive items and refine my items. In the R00 phase, I will test longitudinally whether parents’ enculturative stress and beliefs

about traditional gender roles (e.g., machismo, marianismo) predict PPC and whether that PPC then predicts children’s poor health. With this training, I will later examine culture-specific and unique impacts of PPC in diverse cultures. My results will provide a reproducible methodology for other researchers to create culturally

sensitive measures of PPC based on what people in those cultures believe to be intrusive, which will provide a foundation for culturally sensitive preventive interventions to improve ethnically diverse children’s health and well-being. This project closely fits NICHD’s mission “to ensure the independence and well-being ofall people.”