4 For better, for worse, or both? 115 adolescents’ psychological functioning as outcomes (i.e., self-esteem, depressive symptoms, and anxiety symptoms). Effect Heterogeneity in Within-Family Parenting Effects Parenting takes place within a family (i.e., within-family level), such that parents impact their own children (Belsky & Pluess, 2009; Darling & Steinberg, 1993; Sameroff, 2010). Nonetheless, until recently few empirical studies have conceptualized parenting effects as a phenomenon at the within-family2 level (Boele et al., 2020; Hamaker, 2012; Keijsers, 2016). Instead, most of what is currently known of how parenting relates to adolescent functioning comes from research describing differences between families in their average levels of parenting and adolescent functioning (between-family level; e.g., McLeod, Weisz, et al., 2007; Pinquart, 2017b). Studies examining differential parenting effects have followed the dominant approach and established how between-family parenting effects differ among subgroups of adolescents (e.g., Chavez Arana et al., 2021; Olofsdotter et al., 2018; Tung et al., 2019). However, parenting is not set in stone and fluctuates and changes over time within the same family (Boele, Nelemans et al., 2023; Darling & Steinberg, 1993; Keijsers et al., 2022). Additionally, the effects that parents have upon their own adolescent may also be unique to each family (i.e., effect heterogeneity; Bolger et al., 2019; Grusec, 2008; Keijsers & Van Roekel, 2018). According to environmental sensitivity theories for example, some adolescents respond more strongly to parenting because they are more environmentally sensitive than others (Pluess, 2015). Thus, to understand how parenting effects unfold over time within different families, the current study employs a within-family design. To be able to make inferences about parenting effects within families, a multilevel approach is needed that disentangles stable between-family differences and over-time within-family effects (Hamaker, 2012; Keijsers, 2016). Doing so, several studies have now, for example, demonstrated that how parenting relates to adolescents’ functioning at the between-family level can sometimes be in opposite direction as the effects at the within-family level (e.g., Dietvorst et al., 2018; Nelemans et al., 2020; Villalobos Solís et al., 2015b). In the current study we applied dynamic structural equation modelling (DSEM; Asparouhov et al., 2018), which is a type of multilevel modelling that is especially suited for intensive longitudinal data. DSEM combines the strengths of multilevel modelling, 2 In the parenting literature, the term “within-family” sometimes also refers to differences between family members, for example when studying differential parental treatment of siblings. We use the term within-family to refer to processes that occur within individual families.
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