Parentification, Ethnic Identity, and Psychological Health in Black and White American College Students: Implications of Family-of-Origin and Cultural Factors

Abstract

The authors examined the predictive ability of parentification (i.e., when parental roles and responsibilities are abdicated by parents and carried out by children and adolescents) and ethnic identity on various psychological health factors in college students. Scores from five measures were used to test a conceptual two-factor model in which parentification and ethnic identity predict psychological health; participants were 157 Black Americans and 157 White Americans attending a large public southern university. The measures included the Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test (Babor, Higgins-Biddle, Saunders, and Monteiro, 2001), the Beck Depression Inventory (Beck, Steer, and Brown, 1996), the Eating Attitudes Test (Gamer, Olmsted, Bohr, and Garfinkel, 1982), the Multigroup Ethnic Identity Measure (Phinney, 1992), and the Parentification Inventory (Hooper, 2009). No evidence of a significant difference in mean parentification scores between Black American and White American college student participants was found. However, results from differential item function analyses on individual Parentification Inventory items uncovered some significant differences between the two groups. Results from bivariate correlations uncovered slight differences in the significant associations between predictor variables and outcome variables. In addition, multivariate regression analyses revealed slight differences in study variables’ ability to predict psychological health. Parentification and ethnic identity explained some of the variability in depressive symptoms in both samples. Additionally, parentification and ethnic identity explained some of the variability in disordered eating symptoms in the Black American sample but not in the White American sample. Implications for culturally tailored practice and directions for future culturally focused research are discussed.