Parents of African American and European American youth showed comparable levels of antisocial rewards. However, parents in the African American sample demonstrated significantly higher psychological costs and significantly lower prosocial rewards and problem solving than did parents of European American youth. These results support previous research that found higher levels of psychological costs and related behaviors among African American parents than European Americans (C. R. Bradley, 1998; Pinderhughes, Dodge, Bates, Pettit, & Zelli, 2000). They lend some further evidence to the notion that there are culturally sanctioned parent behaviors that are used more frequently in some groups than in others. There are income disparities between ethnic groups in this study and we cannot rule out the possibility that group differences in the frequency of particular behaviors are due to differences in income. It is also possible that if observations were less structured, structured differently, or longer in duration, race differences would not be so apparent. The frequency of positive behaviors or evidence of positive regard which were lower in African American families might be specific to the way these observations
