Racial and Ethnic Variations in the Protective Effect of Collective Efficacy on Parenting Stress

Background/Purpose: Parenting stress is associated with multiple adverse outcomes for mothers and children including child abuse and neglect.  Prior research has found that collective efficacy is protective against a number of challenges including depression and maladaptive parenting.  The current study examines relationships between collective efficacy and parenting stress with a diverse sample of mothers to understand if (1) Do the constructs of collective efficacy and parenting stress differ by race/ethnicity? (2) Do relationships between collective efficacy and parenting stress differ by race/ethnicity?

Methods: We use the child age 3 and 5 in-home of mothers from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing (FFCW) study (n=3,163). Parenting stress was assessed by four, ordinal items from the fourth wave (e.g. I find that taking care of my children is much more work than pleasure).  Collective efficacy was assessed by two scales from the age 3 data: neighborhood social cohesion and informal social control.  Social cohesion included five ordinal items assessing the mothers’ perceptions neighborhood interaction and support within their neighborhoods (e.g. This is a close-knit neighborhood) and informal social control included five ordinal items that assessed the mothers’ perceptions of their neighbors’ informal policing efforts to maintain social order (e.g. How likely would your neighbors be to intervene if children were showing disrespect to an adult?). Model covariates included maternal education, poverty, depression and employment taken from the age 5 data.

Multiple group confirmatory factor analysis was employed to examine the measurement invariance of constructs across three racial/ethnic groups: Black non-Hispanic (n= 1604), White non-Hispanic (n= 714) and Hispanic (n=845).  Structural equation modeling (SEM) examined relationships between collective efficacy factors and parenting stress.

Results: Measurement invariance testing revealed that collective efficacy and parenting stress factors statistically differed across groups, that is, factor loadings and items thresholds could not be constrained to be equal across groups without statistically significantly deteriorating model fit.  Due to measurement non-invariance, separate SEMs were performed separately for each group.  Results of the separate models revealed that social cohesion predicted lower levels of parenting stress for both White- Non Hispanic mothers and Black Non-Hispanic Mothers but not Hispanic mothers Informal social control was not a significant predictor of parenting stress for any of the race/ethnic groups. All models demonstrated acceptable model fit for each group (RMESA 0.040 - 0.037, TLI 0.983- 0.985, CFI: 0.987- 0.988). 

Conclusions and Implications: Understanding the role of neighborhood processes in parenting stress carries important implications for social work practice, research and policy because parenting stress is associated with a host of maternal and child outcomes. The current study provides important insights for social workers who often work with diverse populations. First, social workers should be mindful of group variations of social constructs; collective efficacy and parenting stress factors differed in meaning for mothers depending on their race/ethnicity.  Second, neighborhood process effects were not universal; social cohesion was found to be protective against parenting stress for Black Non-Hispanic and White Non-Hispanic Mothers, but not for Hispanic mothers.