Chapter 3 102 et al., 2018). Our results and other recent micro timescale studies (Bülow, Van Roekel, et al., 2022), suggest that momentary and daily experiences of increased negative affect could be too small to observe a meaningful impact upon adolescents’ perception of parental support, or vice versa. At longer timescales, repeated momentary experiences may accumulate into observable effects. More concretely, our results suggest that lags between 2 weeks and 3 months might be most appropriate to observe this dynamic process between parenting and adolescent depressive symptoms, whereas a lag of 12 months could become too long. Future studies with multiple timescale designs, especially when all timescales are integrated in one design, are urgently needed to obtain more fine-grained insight into such continuous time dynamics between parental support and depressive symptoms in adolescents. Apart from the possibility of nonlinear continuous time dynamics, another potential explanation for changing effects with varying time intervals lies in inherent changes in how the key concepts can be operationalized. For instance, whereas real-time studies or daily diaries are less strongly affected by recall bias, and therefore more appropriate to tap into concrete behaviors and discrete interactions between parents and adolescents (Keijsers et al., 2022; Repetti et al., 2015), adolescents’ perception of parental support over the last year may be an indicator of overall relationship quality instead (Hinde, 1997). Additionally, whereas real-time studies or daily diaries are able to assess fluctuations in negative affect, longer-term studies are able to assess fluctuations in depressive symptoms more broadly, and thus are able to include more than negative affect, such as feelings of worthlessness and loss of pleasure. However, changing concepts most likely do not provide a full explanation: Even when we exploratorily compared lagged effects with different time intervals within the same dataset using identical operationalizations, the results demonstrated different patterns of effects depending on the choice of analytical time interval. Heterogeneity in Within-Family Processes Increasingly, heterogeneity in parenting processes has been acknowledged (Belsky et al., 2022; L. H. C. Janssen, Elzinga et al., 2021; Keijsers et al., 2016). To address the “one size fits all fallacy” (Bolger et al., 2019; Keijsers & Van Roekel, 2018) in terms of the studied within-family effects, we examined the moderation of adolescent sex and neuroticism. We expected that girls and adolescents scoring high on neuroticism would show stronger increases in depressive symptoms after they perceived a temporary drop in parental support in comparison to boys and adolescents scoring low on neuroticism, and
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