| The main purpose of this project was to explore the relation of family influences and child inhibition to childhood aggression in two cultures, China and the United States. Each factor, including parents' SES, marital status, family environment, parental discipline, children's inhibition, and children's aggressive beliefs, and their relations to childhood aggression were explored through univariate ANOVAs and multiple regressions. Five hypotheses concretely depicted each category of predictors to aggression for the two cultures. The U.S. participants, consisting of 151 mothers and their nine- or ten-year-old children, were interviewed at baseline and in follow-up interviews; the Chinese sample, consisting of 95 parents and their children with the same ages as the U.S. children, were interviewed at two times with three years in between. Results found that for both cultural samples, the strongest predictor category was family physical environment (parents' SES). For the U.S. sample, children displayed more aggressive behaviors when their parents were married, more educated, working more time, or having lower income, or when they were in positive family environments or disciplined more with verbal punishment. More aggressive children also had higher approvals of legitimacy of aggression. For the Chinese sample, children displayed more aggressive behaviors when their parents were less educated or working more time, when they were boys, inhibited, in less negative or more religious family environments, or when they were disciplined less with displacement and spanking or more with verbal punishment. For both cultural samples, harsh physical discipline was not the strongest predictor leading to childhood aggression, but verbal punishment played an important role in predicting aggression. The cultural difference found in the relation of child inhibition to aggression was also explored. |
