Profiles of Parents’ Beliefs About Their Child’s Intelligence and Self-Regulation: A Latent Profile Analysis

Abstract

This study examined parents’ implicit theories of intelligence and self-regulation from a person-centered perspective using latent profile analysis. First, we explored whether different belief profiles exist. Second, we examined if the emergent belief profiles (1) differ by demographic variables (e.g., age, education, child’s self-regulation) and (2) are related to parents’ failure beliefs, goal orientation (i.e., learning goals, performance-approach goals, performance-avoidance goals), and co-regulatory strategies (i.e., mastery-oriented and helpless-oriented strategies). Data were collected from N = 137 parents of preschoolers who answered an online survey comprising their implicit theories about the malleability and relevance of the domains (a) intelligence and (b) self-regulation. We identified three belief profiles: profile 1 (9% of the sample) displayed an entity theory, profile 2 (61% of the sample) showed a balanced pattern of both domains of implicit theories, and profile 3 (30% of the sample) was characterized by high incremental self-regulation theories. Analyses showed that parents differed significantly in education and their perception of child self-regulatory competence depending on profile membership, with parents in profile 1 having the lowest scores compared to parents of the other profiles. Differences in parents’ failure beliefs, goal orientation, and co-regulatory strategies were also found depending on profile membership. Parents in profile 3 reported failure-is-enhancing mindsets, and mastery-oriented strategies significantly more often than parents in profiles 1 and 2. The results provide new insights into the interplay of important domains of implicit theories, and their associations with parents’ failure beliefs, goal orientation, and co-regulatory strategies.

How Finnish and Portuguese Parents’ Implicit Beliefs About Learning Actualize at Home

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Effect of Intelligence Mindsets on Math Achievement for Chinese Primary School Students: Math Self-Efficacy and Failure Beliefs as Mediators

“…Failure beliefs (Nishimura et al, 2017 ; Stern and Hertel, 2020 ) are a way of thinking that views failures as either an enhancing or debilitating experience. Different failure beliefs would lead to different characteristic response patterns to academic difficulties.…”

Relationships Between Achievement Goal Orientations, Learning Engagement, and Academic Adjustment in Freshmen: Variable-Centered and Person-Centered Approaches

“…Researchers classify the latent profiles and understand the proportion of people of the various categories throughout the group according to the answer mode on the individual external test topic, rather than determine the number of classifications a priori . LPA is particularly suitable for exploratory research questions and offers several advantages ( Stern and Hertel, 2020 ). This probabilistic model-based classification method can not only guarantee the largest difference between the divided categories and the smallest difference within the categories but also can be measured by objective statistical indicators.…”

“…The variable-centered approach is helpful to quantify the individual variables’ effects while controlling for potential confounds ( Warren et al, 2021 ), but this approach might conceal important results and implications ( Stern and Hertel, 2020 ). The person-centered approach instead examines how the combination of variables to function together and mainly focuses on subgroups of individuals with the most common patterns of scores observed according to the data ( Lanza and Cooper, 2016 ).…”