Natasha K. Bowen

Parent Involvement, Cultural Capital, and the Achievement Gap Among Elementary School Children

This study examined the level and impact of five types of parent involvement on elementary school children’s academic achievement by race/ethnicity, poverty, and parent educational attainment. The sample comprised 415 third through fifth graders who completed the Elementary School Success Profile. Hypotheses from Bourdieu’s theory of cultural capital were assessed with t tests, chi-square statistics, and hierarchical regressions. Consistent with the theory, parents with different demographic characteristics exhibited different types of involvement, and the types of involvement exhibited by parents from dominant groups had the strongest association with achievement. However, contrary to theoretical expectations, members of dominant and nondominant groups benefited similarly from certain types of involvement and differently from others. Implications for research and practice are discussed.

Effects of Crime and Violence in Neighborhoods and Schools on the School Behavior and Performance of Adolescents

Drawing from a national probability sample of middle and high school students who recently completed The National School Success Profile (SSP), this article focuses on students’reports of their exposure to neighborhood and school danger, and the effects of exposure on their attendance, school behavior, and grades. Males, African Americans, high school students, school lunch recipients, and urban students tended to report higher exposure to environmental danger. Measures of neighborhood and school danger both contributed significantly to the prediction of each school outcome, especially attendance and behavior. Measures of neighborhood danger were slightly more predictive of outcomes than measures of school danger. The findings contribute to the identification of adolescents most likely to live in a context of fear and danger, and provide support for an ecological approach to promoting students’school success.

Neighborhood Social Disorganization, Families, and the Educational Behavior of Adolescents

Using data on 1,757 middle and high school students from a nationally representative sample, relationships among youth perceptions of neighborhood characteristics, parenting processes, and their own school behavior, attendance, and grades were tested using structural equation modeling. A model with direct neighborhood effects on selfreported educational behavior as well as indirect effects mediated through perceptions of supportive parenting and parental educational support fit the data well in calibration and validation samples. Perceived neighborhood social disorganization exerted a larger effect than did family processes on self-reported educational behavior. The importance of including measures of neighborhood environment in future research on educational outcomes is discussed in the context of their substantial contribution in the present investigation.

Cognitive Pretesting and the Developmental Validity of Child Self-Report Instruments: Theory and Applications.

In the context of the importance of valid self-report measures to research and evidence-based practice in social work, an argument-based approach to validity is presented and the concept of developmental validity is introduced. Cognitive development theories are applied to the self-report process of children, and cognitive pretesting is reviewed as a methodology to advance the validity of self-report instruments for children. An application of cognitive pretesting is presented in the development of the Elementary School Success Profile. Two phases of cognitive pretesting were completed to gather data about how children read, interpret, and answer self-report items. Cognitive pretesting procedures identified validity problems with numerous items leading to modifications. Cognitive pretesting framed by an argument-based approach to validity holds significant potential to improve the developmental validity of child selfreport instruments.

Risk and Protective Factors as Predictors of Outcome in Adolescents with Psychiatric Disorder and Aggression

OBJECTIVE To identify predictors of behavioral outcomes in high-risk adolescents with aggression and serious emotional disturbance (SED). METHOD Three hundred thirty-seven adolescents from a statewide North Carolina treatment program for aggressive youths with SED were followed between July 1995 and June 1999 from program entry (T1) to approximately 1 year later (T2). Historical and current psychosocial risk and protective factors as well as psychiatric symptom severity at T1 were tested as predictors of high and low behavioral functioning at T2. Behavioral functioning was a composite based on the frequency of risk-taking, self-injurious, threatening, and assaultive behavior. RESULTS Eleven risk and protective factors were predictive of T2 behavioral functioning, while none of the measured T1 psychiatric symptoms was predictive. A history of aggression and negative parent-child relationships in childhood was predictive of worse T2 behavior, as was lower IQ. Better T2 behavioral outcomes were predicted by a history of consistent parental employment and positive parent-child relations, higher levels of current family support, contact with prosocial peers, higher reading level, good problem-solving abilities, and superior interpersonal skills. CONCLUSIONS Among high-risk adolescents with aggression and SED, psychiatric symptom severity may be a less important predictor of behavioral outcomes than certain risk and protective factors. Several factors predictive of good behavioral functioning represent feasible intervention targets.

The Development and Evaluation of Procedures to Assess Child Self-Report Item Validity.

Cognitive pretesting (CP) is an interview methodology for pretesting the validity of items during the development of self-report instruments. This article reports on the development and evaluation of a systematic method to rate self-report item validity performance utilizing CP interview text data. Five raters were trained in the application of that system, resulting in acceptable to substantial levels of interrater agreement. Results from this study suggest that excellent reliability can be achieved in the analysis of CP data. Guidelines for systematically rating the qualitative data collected using CP methods are provided. Future research should focus on empirical demonstrations of how such rating procedures can lead to improvements in the validity of self-report instruments.

Evidence-based programs in school settings: Barriers and recent advances

In spite of multi-disciplinary calls for the use of evidence-based practice in schools, empirically supported interventions are not being implemented in most schools. To increase the use of evidence-based programs in schools, it may be necessary first to identify characteristics of those programs and other factors that represent barriers to their use. This study examined implementation requirements and the availability of program information of 51 school-based intervention programs. Analyses revealed implementation obstacles such as high start-up costs, challenging training and staffing requirements, and a lack of easily accessible information about programs. Research and practice implications of these findings are presented.

When Is It Appropriate to Focus on Protection in Interventions for Adolescents

Assertions about the appropriateness of targeting risk or protective factors in interventions for adolescents must be qualified in terms of the outcomes and populations examined in studies and in terms of how risk and protection are measured. The cross-sectional and longitudinal relationships between protection and aggressive behavior found for 388 high-risk adolescents (81.7% male; 50.8% African American/other; average age, 14.5) with serious emotional disturbances in this study validated an intervention focus on protective factors.

Conducting Measurement Invariance Tests with Ordinal Data: A Guide for Social Work Researchers

Objective: The validity of measures across groups is a major concern for social work researchers and practitioners. Many social workers use scales, or sets of questionnaire items, with ordinal response options. However, a review of social work literature indicates the appropriate treatment of ordinal data in measurement invariance tests is rare; only 3 of 57 articles published in 26 social work journals over the past 12 years used proper testing procedures. This article synthesizes information from the literature and provides recommendations for appropriate measurement invariance procedures with ordinal data. Method: We use data from the Cebu Longitudinal Health and Nutrition Survey to demonstrate applications of invariance testing with ordinal data. Using a robust weighted least squares estimator and polychoric correlation matrix, we examine invariance of a 10-item Perceived Stress Scale (PSS) across 2 young adult groups defined by health status. We describe 2 competing approaches: a 4-step approach, in which factor loadings and thresholds are tested and constrained separately; and a 3-step approach, in which loadings and thresholds are tested and constrained in tandem. Results: Both approaches lead to the same conclusion that the 2 dimensions of the PSS are noninvariant across health status. In the absence of invariance, mean scores on the PSS factors cannot be validly compared across groups, nor should latent variables be used in the hypothesis testing across the 2 groups. Readers are directed to online resources. Conclusions: Careful examination of social work scales is likely to reveal fit or noninvariance problems across some groups. Use of appropriate methods for invariance testing will reduce misuse of measures in practice and improve the rigor and quality of social work publications.

Knowledge Gaps among School Staff and the Role of High Quality Ecological Assessments in Schools.

Objective: The purpose of the current study was to examine the practice validity of a new ecological assessment instrument for third through fifth graders in terms of whether it provided school staff with new knowledge about students. Method: Preassessment knowledge of school staff was compared to data obtained from 21 children and their parents on 29 measures. Data were collected using the Elementary School Success Profile. School staff preassessment knowledge was compared to obtained data across seven domains of children’s lives (neighborhood, school, family, peers, parent educational involvement, well-being, and home behavior), data sources (child and parent), and grade level of students. Results: Preassessment knowledge was not highly correlated with obtained data; preassessment expectations matched obtained data only about 41% of the time, and knowledge varied by domain, source, and grade level. Conclusions: Ecological assessments can address gaps in school staff’s knowledge of targetable factors that influence the success of students.