Sibling relationships in middle childhood: Associations between naturalistic observations, parents’ evaluations, and children’s self-reports

• In Event: Poster Session 08
  In Poster Session: PS 08 Topic - Family Context & Processes

Abstract

Several studies examining sibling relationships have shown that different observers assess the quality of a same sibling relationship differently (e.g., Buist & Vermande, 2014). Since family relationships stem from the behaviors and perceptions of its members, a study involving both parents’ and children’s perceptions of sibling relationships can help understand how they have come to create a shared vision of their social environments (Howe et al., 2011). To our knowledge, no study has specifically compared how fathers, mothers, observers, and children independently evaluate the quality of the same sibling relationship. Our study has three objectives regarding ratings of sibling relationships: 1) explore the association between mothers’ and fathers’ ratings; 2) examine the association between the independent observations and each parent’s ratings; 3) explore associations between parent ratings, independent observations, and targeted children’s ratings.

Sixty-two intact hetero-biparental families were visited in their homes. During the visits, the target children (Mage=8.75 years, SD=1.09 years; 38 girls) and their siblings played the game Jenga. This allowed for a naturalistic observation of sibling relationships. Independent observers rated the quality of the sibling relationship from the video-recorded sibling interactions. In addition, fathers and mothers completed the Sibling Inventory of Behavior (Hetherington et al., 1999), while the target child completed the Sibling Relationship Inventory (Stocker & McHale, 1992) through an interview conducted at a laboratory visit one month later. Parents and observers’ ratings focus on the participating child’s behaviors in interactions with their siblings rather than a global assessment of the sibling unit.

Results show that mothers and fathers significantly agree on the dimensions of companionship, empathy, teaching, rivalry, and avoidance. When comparing scores derived from independent observations to fathers’ scores, we only observed a moderate and significant association for the companionship dimension. When then comparing independent observations to the mothers’ scores, we observed a moderate and significant association on the empathy, teaching, and aggression dimensions. In comparing children’s assessments to their parents’, we found that when children report high scores of affection towards a sibling, mothers and fathers report high scores of companionship. Higher hostility scores as rated by children were associated with more aggression assessed by mothers, and more avoidance rated by fathers. Lastly, we compared children’s ratings to those of independent observers. Children’s affection scores were negatively associated with aggression as rated by independent observers, while children’s rivalry scores were associated with more avoidance noted by independent observers.

Findings show that mothers agree more with independent observers than fathers. More specifically, fathers seem to make an independent assessment of sibling aggression, compared to all other assessors. This suggests that fathers may have different interpretations of what constitutes aggressive behavior. Additionally, consistent with the observations of Howe et al. (2011) indicating a better mother-child concordance on positive dimensions, both parents seem to have accurately assessed the companionship dimension, as their reports are both associated with affection as reported by the children. These results support that different evaluators view the sibling relationship differently, and that scholars should thus make a cautious choice of informant.

Authors

• Jean-Francois Bureau, University of Ottawa
  Presenting Author

• Veronique Woychuk, University of Ottawa
  Non-Presenting Author

• Audrey-Ann Deneault, University of Calgary (U of C)
  Non-Presenting Author