Adolescent Relationship Volatility and Emotional Health: Insights from an Intensive Longitudinal Study

• In Event: 4167 - Section on Children and Youth Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Children & Youth Roundtable 1: Emotional Health

Abstract

Romantic partnerships have the capacity to influence adolescents’ emotional health, particularly given their often unstable nature. However, lack of measurement precision in cross-sectional and periodic longitudinal studies has made it difficult to assess links between volatility in adolescent relationship quality and adolescents’ emotional health. Using novel bi-weekly diary data from the mDiary Study of Adolescent Relationships linked to six waves of birth cohort data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, this paper incorporates multilevel mixed effects models to: capture associations between changes in adolescent relationship quality and changes in adolescent emotional health; determine whether these associations persist net of factors that potentially select adolescents into unstable partnerships; detect whether such association(s) vary by partnership type; and investigate moderation by gender.

Authors

• Sara Ivethe Villalta, University of California, Irvine

• Rachel E. Goldberg, University of California, Irvine

• Marta Tienda, Princeton University