Caregiver and Adolescent Discrepancies in Perceptions of Violence and Their Associations with Early Adolescent Aggression

Abstract

This article examined the role of caregiver messages about violence and exposure to neighborhood violence on adolescent aggression in light of research regarding discrepancies between parents and their children. Drawing upon data from an urban African American sample of 144 caregiver/early adolescent dyads (M = 12.99; SD = 0.93; 58.7% female) we examined covariates of discrepancies between caregiver and adolescent reports of perceptions of violence as well as their association with adolescent aggression. Analyses suggested that concordance in perceptions of violence was associated with children’s attitudes about violence and caregivers’ perceptions of family communication. Structural equation modeling indicated a unique role for individual perceptions and suggested that agreement in awareness of neighborhood violence could be protective for early adolescent involvement in aggression.

Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Parent–Adolescent Discrepancies: Existing Findings and Future Directions

“…Four other articles reported findings for U.S. ethnic minority samples, with two of the studies involving African-American families (Johnson et al 2016;Skinner and McHale 2016) and two involving Hispanic families (Córdova et al 2016;Valdes et al 2016). The rest of the 13 empirical reports (excluding the Korelitz and Garber (2016) meta-analysis and the De Los Reyes and Ohannessian (2016) Introduction) used mixed community samples, with European-American/ Caucasian families comprising from 40 % of the sample (Jager et al 2016) to 81 % (Metzger et al 2016).…”

“…These families were therefore rather atypical of African-American families in general, given that [70 % of African-American children are born to single mothers and about 30 % of African-American families live in poverty. The Johnson et al (2016) study reflects this more typical demographic, given that their 144 families were recruited from urban middle schools in neighborhoods known for high levels of violence, 73 % of the caregivers were mothers and 6 % were fathers, and 60 % of the parents reported high school education or less.…”

Reconsidering the “violence-as-a-disease” model: Examining violence psychopathologies in urban adolescents.

“…According to the classic epidemiologic “triad” model, diseases are cultivated through the interplay of an external agent , a vulnerable host , and an environment/location that brings the host and agent together (Dicker et al, 2006). Illuminating the highly macrosocial nature of violence, research suggests that most adolescent violence—that is, violence between an external agent (primary antagonist) and a secondary antagonist (a perpetrator who is perhaps less eager than the external agent to commit violence but nevertheless does, or a victim who is unwilling to commit violence, even when physically attacked)—occurs on school grounds (Basile et al, 2020; James et al, 2020; Lindstrom Johnson et al, 2016). Here, school grounds, as the site of violence’s manifestation, would be operationalized as a disease environment .…”

Links between shared and unique perspectives of parental psychological control and adolescent emotional problems: A dyadic daily diary study

“…Additionally, adolescents who hold high divergent perceptions of such parental or adolescent behaviors likely perceive parents as failing to grant them enough autonomy and independence or emotionally unsupportive. Moreover, parent–adolescent convergence and divergence are linked to adolescent adjustments (e.g., positive and negative affect) and family functions (e.g., mother–child conflict), indicating the necessity to integrate a multi‐informant approach to better understand the processes of family dynamics and adolescent development (De Los Reyes & Ohannessian, 2016; Janssen et al, 2021; Lindstrom Johnson et al, 2016). Parent–adolescent convergent and divergent perceptions of parental psychological control may have different implications for different perceptions of adolescent emotional problems, but to the best of our knowledge, researchers have yet to examine these associations.…”