Understanding and Adjusting for Bias in cross-national Parent Reports: The role of socialization goals

Instruments for measuring children's mental health have often been developed and validated in western countries, but are used worldwide. However, the comparability of parent reports across different cultures has been repeatedly questioned. Research on reasons for this lack of comparability and on methods to deal with the problem is scarce. The proposed study intends to address these two issues. What parents consider to be a problematic behavior might be influenced by their socialization goals. Socialization goals are one aspect of parenting beliefs, which refer to the characteristics parents value and want their children to attain when they grow up. Socialization goals are informed by the cultural model of the parents, and thus vary by culture. Objectives and Research questions In a preliminary study with German- and Turkish-origin parents in Germany, we found that Turkish-origin parents perceived vignettes describing children’s externalizing problem behaviors as more problematic than native German parents. This effect was mediated by endorsing the socialization goals of obedience and collectivism. In the proposed study, we set out to examine the generalizability of this finding by using a cross-national sample. Furthermore, the vignettes will be used as anchors to adjust parent reports on their own child's mental health. Anchoring vignettes have previously been proposed as a solution to deal with bias in self-reports. Vignettes depicting children who manifest in problem behaviors to a lesser or greater degree are presented to the parents. Parents will be asked to rate the extent to which they consider such behavior as problematic. These ratings are used to adjust the parents’ mental health scores on their own child. Participants We plan to include n=100 parents per country with children aged 4-12 years from the US, Germany, China, Russia and Mexico in our study. The selection of countries is based on the expected heterogeneity in parents' socialization goals. Study method First, we will ask the parents to report their child’s mental health using the Pediatric Symptom Checklist. Then, we will present six vignettes and ask the parents to rate the perceived severity of the depicted behavior. In addition, socialization goals are measured with five scales consisting of 22 items. We will also collect sociodemographic information from the parents. For the analyses we want to use the R packages lavaan and anchors.