This proposal describes a three year, longitudinal pilot study of the risk and protective factors in child abuse. The study targets a three generational sample of pregnant teenagers, their mothers, and their babies, all of African-American and Latino descent. The primary objective of the research is to examine the mechanisms by which risk and protective factors for child abuse are linked to abuse outcome. A secondary objective is to evaluate the ability of a group intervention to reduce abusive parenting in teenage mothers. Using concepts from attachment theory, the study proposes a risk buffering model of child abuse which includes four components: Internal working model of the grandmother, internal working model of the mother, social support and parenting. The model postulates a unidirectional relationship between grandmother's internal working model and mother's internal working model, and bi-directional relationships between mother's internal working model, social support and parenting. For the first time in the attachment and child abuse literature, this study examines the contribution of the grandmother's internal working model to the quality of the mother's parenting. The study will include 30 pregnant teenagers, their mothers, and their babies. As an incentive to participate, the teenagers will be offered a group intervention spaced over a three year period: (a) an eight-month group, to begin while the teenagers are pregnant and to continue after the babies are born, (b) a ten-week group when the infants are one years old, and (c) a ten-week group when the infants are two years old. The groups will focus on the mother's experiences of being parented by her own parents and how these experiences inform her own parenting and transition to parenthood. There will be three points of assessment (pre-intervention, post-first intervention, and post-third intervention), including measures of the mother's and grandmother's internal working model, social support from family, friends, and romantic partners, and mother's parenting. Parenting is observed in three different settings (curing play, while shopping, and through self-report), and measured along four dimensions with a focus on physical abuse, emotional abuse, physical neglect, and emotional neglect. Proposed analyses include (a) tests of alternative models through multiple regression and structural modeling to examine which combination of variables best predicts parenting outcome, and (b) univariate analysis and multiple regression to examine the main and moderator effects of the group intervention on parenting over time.
