UC Santa Barbara

There is increased awareness of the need to attend to the mental health of preschool-age children. Concurrently, there has been considerable focus on the growing Latinx student population in the U.S. However, little attention has been placed on evaluating the appropriateness of mental health screening tools for use with preschool-age Latinx children. The first study of this integrated dissertation evaluated the structural, convergent, and predictive validity of the Pediatric Symptom Checklist – 17 (PSC-17) for use with Latinx preschool children as rated by their Spanish- and English-speaking parents (N = 488). Confirmatory factor analyses demonstrated that the best-fitting model for the Spanish and English samples was a higher-order model, in which three factors (externalizing problems, internalizing problems, and attention problems) loaded onto a broader factor, social-emotional risk. However, one item was removed from each language sample in order to obtain adequate fit. Measurement invariance analyses were unable to be conducted due to problematic items that differed across samples. Evidence of convergent and predictive validity were demonstrated through relations with parent-rated instruments, although the PSC-17 was not significantly predictive of teacher-rated social emotional functioning. These findings have implications for its use as a universal mental health screening measure.

The second study sought to understand Latinx parental stress factors as they relate to three types of parental engagement in preschool (foundational education, school participation, and supplemental education). Stress was examined in the form of global stress and acculturative stress (English competence pressure and pressure to acculturate). One-hundred eighty-nine Spanish- and English-speaking Latinx parents whose children were enrolled in Head Start completed self-report paper-and-pencil surveys. Hierarchical linear regression models were used to evaluate the main effects of stress, as well as the moderating effects of English competence pressure and pressure to acculturate on the association between global stress and the three forms of parental engagement. Results demonstrated that global stress significantly predicted foundational education and supplemental education, but not school participation behaviors. English competence pressure did not significantly predict any type of parental engagement and pressure to acculturate only significantly predicted supplemental education behaviors. Parent generation status and parent education level were the only significant predictors of school participation. These findings have implications for developing family-school partnerships with Latinx parents of preschool children.