Transactional Processes between Parental Support and Adolescent Depressive Symptoms: From Daily to Annual Processes

• In Event: Studying the Dynamics of Parenting Adolescents on a Momentary Timescale

Abstract

Introduction. Parental emotional support and adolescents’ depressive symptoms are hypothesized to be transactionally related within families. Thus, a lack of parental support increases the risk for elevated depressive symptoms in adolescents. Elevated depressive symptoms, in turn, might either provoke more supportive behavior from parents to help their child cope with their depressive feelings, or may initiate relationship erosion (thus a decrease in parental support) by accumulated aversive interactions due to the depressed behavior of the adolescent (Coyne, 1976; Rudolph, 2009). An open question remains whether the effect of adolescent depressive symptoms on parental support depends on the studied timescale, as existing within-family studies have mostly investigated a daily or annual timescale (Boele et al., 2019). Therefore, we examined the transactional within-family processes between parental support and adolescent depressive symptoms on a wide range of timescales, ranging from daily to biennial. We hypothesized that a decrease in parental support is associated with a subsequent increase in adolescent depressive symptoms, regardless of the timescale. Additionally, we hypothesized that an increase in adolescent depressive symptoms is associated with a subsequent increase in parental support on a short timescale (i.e., from day-to-day) but a decrease in parental support on a longer timescale (e.g., from year-to-year). We explored whether relationship erosion already sets in at intermediate timescales (i.e., two-weekly and three-monthly time interval).
Method. We conducted pre-registered Random-Intercept Cross-lagged Panel Models with five longitudinal datasets with varying measurement intervals: daily (N = 244, Mage = 13.9, t = 7), two-weekly (N = 259, Mage = 14.5, t = 15), three-monthly (N = 245, Mage = 13.9, t = 3), annual (N ≈ 500, age range = 10-15, t = 5), and a biennial time interval (N ≈ 400, age range = 9-12, t = 3). All datasets measured adolescent-reported parental support and adolescent depressive symptoms, expect for the daily dataset in which daily negative affect was an indicator of adolescents’ depressive symptoms.
Results. The annual and biennial datasets have yet to be analyzed and these results will also be presented during the conference. The preliminary results with the daily, two-weekly, and three-monthly datasets showed a significant negative lagged effect from adolescent depressive symptoms to parental support on a two-weekly (βs -.07 to -.05) and three-monthly time interval (βs -.30 and -.27), but not from day-to-day. This lagged effect demonstrated that parental support decreased after adolescents’ depressive symptoms increased. No lagged effects was found from parental support to adolescent depressive symptoms, however. Moreover, as expected, a significant within-family correlation was found with the two-weekly (rs ≥ -.15) and three-monthly (rs ≥ -.26) data, showing that time-specific increases in parental support covaried with decreases in depressive symptoms within families. Furthermore, we consistently found a significant negative between-family correlation (rs ≥ -.37), such that higher average levels of parental support were correlated with lower average levels of depressive symptoms between families. To summarize, we found support for the relationship erosion hypothesis on intermediate timescales, indicating that elevated depressive symptoms in adolescents were followed by diminished (perceived) parental support.

Authors

• Savannah Boele, Erasmus University Rotterdam
  Presenting Author

• Stefanie Nelemans, Utrecht University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Jaap Denissen, Utrecht University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Peter Prinzie, Erasmus University Rotterdam
  Non-Presenting Author

• Anne Bülow, Erasmus University Rotterdam
  Non-Presenting Author

• Loes Keijsers, Erasmus University Rotterdam
  Non-Presenting Author