Bicultural Family Process: Comparative Analyses across Filipino and Korean American Families

Purpose: The majority of existing family process measures were developed based on Western theories on parenting and family process. Asian American family process is a unique blend of traditional Asian culture, mainstream U.S. culture, and the experiences of immigration and racial/ethnic minority status. These unique processes, especially indigenous parenting values and behaviors, are unlikely fully captured by existing conventional measures. This dearth of culturally specific indigenous measures poses a serious methodological challenge to the study of Asian American families. To fill this critical gap, the present study developed an array of indigenous family process measures for Filipino and Korean American families, tested their quality as measures, and further examined correlations between these new measures and conventional parenting measures.  

Methods: This study used pretest data from the Midwest Longitudinal Study of Asian American Families Project that includes self-administered survey from 155 Filipino American youth and 151 parents and 188 Korean American youth and 186 parents. This study used parent data only. Three groups of measures were included: (1) core cultural values (e.g., traditional manners & etiquette, respect for adults, caring for aging parents, harmony & sacrifice), (2) indigenous parenting behaviors (e.g., indirect affection, interdependence) and (3) conventional parenting (e.g., authoritarian and authoritative styles, explicit affection). Using STATA and Mplus (v 7.4), new measures were examined for psychometric properties (e.g., item-total correlation, reliability) and measurement fit (e.g., factor loading). When appropriate, measurement invariance test was tested by ethnicity. To examine interrelations among measures, pairwise correlations were examined within and between each group of measures. The correlations were examined separately for each ethnic group and then compared using Fisher’s correlation test (z-statistics) across the two ethnic groups.

Results: The finalized set of scales overall showed a high measurement quality. In those measures, Filipino parents reported higher expectations, greater control over their children and higher family obligation than do Korean parents. When tested for invariance, several measures (e.g, respect for adults, family obligation, and gendered norms) achieved configural and metric invariance. The significant differences across the two groups were found between core cultural values and parenting practices. That is, cultural values were significantly correlated with indigenous parenting behaviors among Filipino American parents, but not among Korean American parents. Core cultural values were also significantly correlated with negative conventional parenting measures (e.g., psychological control, child-based worth) only among Filipino American parents.

Conclusions and Implications: The newly tested measures demonstrated a promising utility for future study. They also showed that the characteristics of presumed collectivist cultures in America are highly variable and that Western parenting styles do not necessarily correlate with expected parenting practices within such collectivist cultures. It was also noted that, even as conventional measures alone do not fully capture the parenting beliefs and practices, parents in both groups were reticent when it comes to indigenous measures, showing a sign of acculturation in parenting, i.e., bicultural parenting. With an enhanced understanding of culture specific family process, social work practices can better design interventions and programs that are appropriate to respective community.