Presenting Author:
Socialization is the process through which children learn values and behaviors that are appropriate in their cultural communities. Despite the importance of socialization to child development, most socialization studies have been conducted in developed countries. Findings may differ by countries’ level of economic development, cultural values, and social challenges. We compared parents’ and adolescents’ ideas about, and developed measures of, positive socialization in Nepal, Mexico, and Mozambique. We conducted focus groups regarding adults’ ideas about socialization strategies (N = 113). Socialization codes were generated based on themes in the data and the literature. Four themes of positive socialization emerged across countries: guidance, reinforcement, modeling, and communication. This suggests that there are commonalities in socialization practices across countries. These data informed the construction of socialization questionnaires that were administered to 11 to 17 year olds (N = 2673) and their caregivers. We used exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses to establish the measurement structure of the socialization questionnaire within each country. Some socialization strategies loaded onto the same factor across countries (guidance, communication). This may suggest that, universally, caregivers who provide guidance also tend to communicate with adolescents. Differences also emerged. For adult reports, modeling loaded with other positive parenting strategies in Nepal, but was a unique factor in Mozambique and Mexico. Modeling might be a different construct, or may be related to other socialization strategies not captured in our data in Mexico and Mozambique. Adolescent-reported findings mirrored adult reports in corresponding countries, except that Mexican adolescents perceived reinforcement as a separate factor from guidance, modeling, and communication. Although Mexican adults and adolescents perceived positive parenting as multi-dimensional, they disagree on what behaviors define each dimension. Our results shed light on similarities and differences in socialization strategies in developing countries. Future directions include examining how socialization predicts social competence in these youths.