Testing Whether Protective Parenting is a Causal Mediator of Intervention Effects on Decreased Delinquency Using a Randomized Prevention Trial

Abstract

Protective parenting practices, including parental monitoring and establishing nurturing and supportive rules, are thought to affect the risk of children’s involvement in delinquency. However, there has yet to be any direct test of this hypothesis using experimental data designed to test causality better. Data from 346 Black couples with an 11-year-old child were assigned randomly to Protecting Strong African American Families (ProSAAF) intervention or control condition. Results from traditional mediation models, causal mediation analysis, and the complier analysis indicated that the intervention had a significant indirect effect on youth delinquent behaviors and that effects on protective parenting mediated this effect. The results demonstrated that ProSAAF, which is designed to promote family communication, is effective in deterring delinquent behaviors among Black Americans who reside in resource-scarce communities by enhancing parenting practices.

Keywords:

• Protective parenting
• delinquency
• family-centered preventive program
• causal mediating analysis
• complier average causal effect modeling

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Data Availability Statement

Data are only available upon request to the CONTACT to replicate analyses because couple data are potentially identifiable. The analyses described in this manuscript have not been presented previously.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by award R01 AG059260 funded by the National Institute on Aging and R01 HD069439 funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development to Steven R. H. Beach, and by award P50 DA051361 funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.