Modeling Variation in Paternal Encouragement and Monitoring Among African American Adolescents Living in Urban Public Housing: A Latent Profile Analytic Approach

Abstract

At its inception, research on African American families living in urban public housing focused narrowly on single-female-headed households with children. The perceived near absence of African American fathers in public housing households may have contributed to the lack of interest in assessing the effects of paternal behavior on the well-being of their children. Consequently, there is a dearth of research investigating the role that fathers play in the lives of their children in public housing communities. The purpose of this paper is to contribute to this gab in knowledge by modeling variations in paternal caregivers’ behavior based on the perceptions on their children. Using a sample of 549 African American youth living in public housing, we employed latent profile analysis and multinomial logistic regression to identified paternal typologies and assessed how youth were correctly classified in paternal typologies based on the youths’ attitudes and behaviors. The overall model significantly distinguished youth by paternal class membership. The model correctly classified 55 % of the cases. Implications to practice are discussed.