Villages and Schools As Moderators on the Relationships Between Parenting Practices and Youth Psychological Adjustment in Rural China: A Cross-Classified Multilevel Investigation

Background/purpose: Globally, internalizing symptoms continue to plague children and adolescents, and have lasting effects on future social and emotional well-being. Compared to the mounting research conducted on U.S. youth internalizing problems, children and adolescents in Mainland China have received very little attention on their psychological adjustment. As Chinese people constitute roughly one-fifth of the world’s population, and the disproportionate quantity of social determinant literature on Chinese youth psychological functioning, understanding the risk and protective factors leading to internalizing difficulties among Chinese youth is critical. 

According to Bronfenbrenner’s Ecological Systems Theory, we need to look beyond a single environment and analyze the interactions among multiple contexts to study youth effectively. Unfortunately, the simultaneous investigation of family, village and school influences on adolescent psychological functioning in rural China is rare and the application of appropriate analytic techniques necessary to understand the nested nature of the data appears to be non-existent. Thus, this study investigated two research questions: 1. Whether the effects of parenting practices on rural youth internalizing symptoms differ by village-level poverty and illiteracy? 2. To what extent are parenting practices influences on rural youth internalizing symptoms moderated by school-level lack of teacher support and peer delinquency?

Methods: This study uses the Wave II (2004) data from the Gansu Survey of Children and Families (GSCF). The GSCF is the first most comprehensive study of children and adolescents ever conducted in rural China, obtained data at the individual, family, neighborhood, and school levels in four waves from 2000 to 2009. The Wave II survey includes a primary sample of 1,400 children and adolescents aged 9-17 in 100 rural villages in Gansu, an impoverished interior province in Northwest China.

The outcome variable is internalizing symptoms measured by the Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL). Individual control variables (Level-1) consisted of adolescent age, biological sex, and family SES. Individual-level variables (Level-1) are parental warmth and parental punishment. Village-level variables (Level-2) consisted of village poverty and village illiteracy. School-level variables (Level-2) consisted of lack of teacher support and peer delinquency. Research questions are examined using cross-classified random effects models (CCREMs) with individuals nested within villages and schools. All multivariate data analyses are conducted using PROC MIXED in SAS v9.1.4.

Results and Implication: The findings suggest the relationship between parenting practices and youth internalizing symptom varies by village-level characteristics. For every one standard deviation increase in village poverty and illiteracy, scores on the outcome are predicted to increase 0.14 and 0.09 standard deviations, respectively, while controlling for other parenting and school variables. However, the data do not suggest a moderating relationship between these parenting and school characteristics in relation to the psychological adjustment of rural youth, due to none of the parameter estimates for the four parenting*school interactions is statistically significant. The proportion of variance accounted for by village and school characteristics together (ICC=.157) is statistically significantly greater than the proportion of variance accounted for by village characteristics alone (ICC=.097) and school characteristics alone (ICC=.060). Implications for social work in rural Chinese communities will be discussed.