Factors influencing parental investment : does parental financial allocation vary as a function of perceived child sexual orientation?
Abstract
An evolutionary perspective on parental investment suggests that natural selection might have favored mechanisms by which parents can evaluate the likelihood of a given offspring’s chances of successful reproduction. Adopting such a perspective, an online survey-based monetary allocation task was employed to test the hypothesis that parental investment was positively related to likelihood of offspring heterosexuality, such that vignettes describing heterosexual offspring would receive more money than vignettes describing homosexual offspring. Results did not support this hypothesis, as investment in offspring was unrelated to perceived offspring sexual orientation. However, exploratory analyses revealed that increasingly negative attitudes towards lesbians and gays predicted decreased investment in offspring. Such findings could serve to embolden civil rights activists in their struggle for increased LGBT social rights. Future research in this area would benefit from correlational research examining real familial relationships and investment patterns, rather than experimentally simulated relationships, to increase the external validity of findings and to reduce social desirability bias.Collections
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Parental Involvement: Barriers Hispanic Parents FaceAbstract Parental involvement in education is considered to be one of the key contributing factors to students’ academic success whose benefits have been well established. In spite of this, lack of parental involvement continues to be one of the leading concerns schools in the United States face, especially among Hispanic parents whose children have long been characterized by low levels of high school completion and highest dropout rates of any other ethnicity. Findings indicate that Hispanic parents face unique barriers, such as language barriers, low levels of education, and economic hardships that hinder their involvement in their children’s education and that traditional approaches aimed at increasing parental involvement, which focus on school-based involvement, have proved largely ineffective with Hispanic parents as they fail to consider the factors that dissuade parents from becoming involved. These insights can inform schools and educators’ efforts of increasing parental involvement by identifying and creating awareness about the factors that influence and preclude parental involvement among Hispanic parents.
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