# Parental psychological control in Mexican immigrant families: A culturally sensitive measure and mechanism

> **NIH NIH K99** · UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON · 2024 · $126,306

## Abstract

I aim to become an independent researcher who studies parenting in diverse cultures via multiple methods
and who builds, tests, and evaluates culturally sensitive preventive interventions for ethnically diverse families.
This project will build on my expertise in parental psychological control (conceptualization, measurement, and
mechanisms), my skills in quantitative data analyses, and my experience with questionnaire data collection.
Additional training in family observations and interviews and solidifying my expertise in Latinx parenting (K99)
will equip me to test my culturally sensitive mechanisms of PPC longitudinally (R00) and develop and evaluate
culturally sensitive preventive interventions for culturally diverse families (future R01). My efforts to promote
equity based on my background—coming from poverty, being a first-generation college student, having
recovered from physical disabilities, and being a woman—make me eligible for the Maximizing Opportunities for
Scientific and Academic Independent Careers program to enhance workforce diversity.
Parental psychological control (PPC)—a set of intrusive parenting behaviors that emotionally manipulate children
to obey their parents—has been associated with diverse negative developmental outcomes reported in more
than 770 papers. However, the lack of culturally sensitive measures and of the mechanisms of PPC limits our
understanding of if and how PPC impairs children’s development in diverse cultures. Although behaviors
ethnically diverse families consider to be intrusive may differ from what white American families consider intrusive,
this cultural variability of intrusiveness has been neglected in the PPC research literature. Drawing from my Two
Facet Parental Psychological Control conceptual framework, I will measure what Mexican immigrant families
believe to be intrusive (K99). Drawing from the Family Stress Model and the Integrative model for studying
children’s developmental competencies of minority children, I will test a culturally sensitive mechanism of PPC in
a longitudinal study (R00) with my refined PPC questionnaire from K99.
In the K99 phase, I will observe and interview families and administer my PPC questionnaire to families to adapt
my questionnaire to Mexican immigrant families. I will include fathers, who have been excluded from most PPC
research, and adopt mixed methods to use interview and observation results to generate culturally sensitive items
and refine my items. In the R00 phase, I will test longitudinally whether parents’ enculturative stress and beliefs
about traditional gender roles (e.g., machismo, marianismo) predict PPC and whether that PPC then predicts
children’s poor health. With this training, I will later examine culture-specific and unique impacts of PPC in
diverse cultures. My results will provide a reproducible methodology for other researchers to create culturally
sensitive measures of PPC based on what people in those cultures believe to be intrusive...

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10947516
- **Project number:** 1K99HD115797-01
- **Recipient organization:** UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON
- **Principal Investigator:** SoYoung Choe
- **Activity code:** K99 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2024
- **Award amount:** $126,306
- **Award type:** 1
- **Project period:** 2024-09-11 → 2026-08-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10947516

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10947516, Parental psychological control in Mexican immigrant families: A culturally sensitive measure and mechanism (1K99HD115797-01). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-24 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10947516. Licensed CC0.

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