Research That Matters (January 17 - 20, 2008)

Purpose: In the past few decades we witnessed emergence of interest in self-efficacy as a core protective factor during adolescence. Thought to be central to human motivation (Bandura, 1986), self-efficacy reflects how individuals perceive their competence and power to regulate functioning and affect outcomes. For children and adolescents, it is the belief that they can do something if they try. Efficacious beliefs are particularly important in school contexts since the perceived inability to succeed predicts academic failure, truancy and, ultimately, dropout. Research on factors that promote academic self-efficacy, however, is scant. In particular, we know little about the role that parenting practices play in the development of academic self-efficacy during childhood.

This study considers the relationship between parenting practices and academic self-efficacy in adolescents. Annette Lareau's (2000) sociological theory of class-based parenting suggests that children from poor and working-class families develop less efficacious beliefs about their performance in school relative to children from middle- and upper-class families. Through ethnographic inquiry, Lareau finds that children from poor and working-class families are typically raised in households that value hierarchical family systems in which they are expected to concede adult authority without debate or negotiation. She also finds that these children adopt restrained and passive roles in social contexts outside of the home. The purpose of this study is to shed light on the ways in which parenting practices may influence adolescent perceptions of efficacy about school.

Methods: Using quantitative data from the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods, a large-scale, interdisciplinary study of child and adolescent development, this study explores Lareau's theory to see whether adolescent perceptions of school self-efficacy are shaped by class-based parenting practices. Class-based parenting is a measure of 13 items derived from confirmatory factor analysis (á=.75) (Buck, 2007). The sample includes 1,374 Hispanic (47%), African American (37%) and European American (16%) adolescents ages 11 to 17. To account for the multi-layered nature of adolescent development, the relationships are estimated in a 3-level hierarchical model that includes individual, family and neighborhood characteristics.

Results: Results from bivariate analyses confirm significant differences between parenting practices of poor/working-class and middle class families (p<.001). Results from multivariate, multi-level analyses indicate that perceptions of academic self-efficacy in adolescents whose parents middle-class parenting practices are significantly higher than their peers in lower class families (p<.05), controlling for race/ethnicity, age, cognitive skills, health status, school environment and neighborhood characteristics. For every standard deviation increase in middle-class parenting practices, adolescent self-efficacy increases by .04 standard deviations.

Implications: These findings suggest important, albeit complicated, implications for social work theory and practice. From a theoretical standpoint, they reaffirm the central role that parents play in child development. They also underscore the ways in which socioeconomics can influence parenting behaviors to the detriment of children perhaps because of the ways that poor and working-class parents are economically and socially marginalized. From a practice standpoint, we are therefore charged with balancing the desire to improve children's outcomes, perhaps through parenting interventions, without further disenfranchising economically fragile families.