The Measurement of Parental Influence

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Abstract
The influence that parents have on the social, behavioral, and psychological status of their children is the focus of a large and important body of literature in the social sciences. The data collected to study parental influence often describe individual mothers and fathers, leaving the researcher with the problem of representing the joint influence of these individuals as parents. A diagonal ANOVA model is proposed to represent parental influence as the weighted effects of one variable that describes father and one that describes mother. Extensions of the diagonal model that facilitate tests of various hypotheses pertaining to variation in the relative influence of mother and father are proposed. Models that represent the effects of asymmetry of parental characteristics are discussed as well. This application of the diagonal ANOVA model is illustrated using data on the effects of social bonds to mother and to father as a deterrent to the delinquent behavior of black and white male adolescents.