A study of relationships among demographic variables such as SES and family constellation, process variables such as parental beliefs and teaching strategies, and preschool‐age children's level of representational competence was conducted within the framework of the family as a system of mutual influences. One hundred and twenty families that varied with respect to number, spacing, ordinal position and sex of children and parent education‐income level were participants. Discriminant function analyses and analyses of variance indicated that both parents and children from one‐child families differed from those from three‐child families and that child spacing and SES were often involved in interactions that produced significant differences between groups. Regression analyses indicated that parental beliefs and behaviors and parental distancing behaviors and child outcomes were related to one another above and beyond demographic characteristics. Results of path analyses generally supported the model of the family in which parental distancing behaviors affect children's representational competence and children's ability level, as well as parental education, age and number of children, affect parental beliefs.
This study investigated ninth and twelfth grade students’ (N=640) distributive justice reasoning. Participants read stories presenting characters that varied in personal characteristics (popularity, productivity, need, and appearance), family type (biologically related/stepsiblings), and context (work/education). Adolescents allocated rewards to story characters, provided rationales for allocations, and judged the fairness of allocation patterns representing different justice principles. Older adolescents were more likely to favor equity and benevolence principles than younger adolescents on all three measures. Older adolescents, especially female students, also took kinship and contextual factors into account more often than younger adolescents. Male students tended to favor equity across conditions; female students’ views of fairness showed greater nuance, varying to a greater degree with relationship and contextual factors. Findings suggest distributive justice reasoning continues to develop through late adolescence, probably due to age‐related cognitive and socialization factors and experiences. Further, findings suggest that gender differences in adult justice reasoning arise in adolescence.
College students (N = 125) reported their perceptions of family relations in response to vignettes that presented 5 different parenting styles. Participants viewed family relations as most positive when parents were portrayed as authoritative or permissive and as most negative when parents were portrayed as uninvolved-neglecting or authoritarian. Student gender and parent gender effects qualified these findings. Female students reported family relations to be less positive than did male students when parents were depicted as authoritarian or as uninvolved-neglecting, and they rated family relations more positively than did male students when parents were depicted as permissive. Participants viewed family relations as more positive when mothers rather than fathers were presented as permissive and when fathers rather than mothers were depicted as authoritarian. The authors discuss the findings of the study in relation to theories of beliefs about children and implications for future parenting styles of male and female college students.
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