Chapter 5 150 Methodological Advancements: From Group-Level Patterns to the Dynamics of Individual Families Most empirical parenting studies employ nomothetic methods to establish general principles (Molenaar, 2004; Molenaar & Campbell, 2009), often by examining grouplevel patterns (Boele et al., 2020; Keijsers, 2016). Such examinations have indicated, for example, that adolescents whose parents display higher levels of support have better psychological well-being (e.g., fewer depressive symptoms) – on average – than adolescents whose parents display lower levels of support (Pinquart, 2017a, 2017b). Meta-analytic work on group-level associations highlights these bidirectional associations between parenting and adolescent well-being (Pinquart, 2017a, 2017b), which initially seems to support theoretical notions of reciprocal parent-adolescent influences (Soenens & Vansteenkiste, 2020). At the same time, however, it has been increasingly purported that group-level patterns do not necessarily align with dynamic processes that unfold within individual families (Hamaker, 2012; Molenaar, 2004). That is, relations between average parenting and average adolescent well-being may not describe family-specific relations between parenting and well-being, especially if these processes are expectedly heterogeneous across families (Hamaker, 2012; Moeller, 2022). Therefore, the heavy reliance on nomothetic methods in parenting science (Boele et al., 2020), and in other fields of psychological science (Bolger et al., 2019; Bryan et al., 2021), is problematic for the accuracy and implementation of scientific findings. Group-level patterns suggesting reciprocal associations between parenting and adolescent well-being (Pinquart, 2017a, 2017b; Willoughby & Hamza, 2011) could obscure the direction of the effects at the level of the individual family. Additionally, translating group-level patterns into nomothetic parenting advice might unintentionally harm families if they are not described well by the group average. Thus, to promote the well-being of adolescents (Shorey et al., 2022), there is an urgent need to gain empirical insights into how parents and adolescents impact each other within individual families. This may ultimately help practitioners develop and apply interventions tailored to a family’s dynamics and needs. To gain these insights into how heterogeneous parents and adolescents influence each other within individual families, an idiographic approach is needed (Beltz et al., 2016; Molenaar, 2004). One increasingly popular method, but lacking in parenting research (Boele et al., 2020; Keijsers et al., 2022), is to use intensive longitudinal data (e.g., experience sampling or daily diary data). The very first idiographic parenting studies provided evidence that parenting effects on adolescent well-being indeed varied from family to family in both magnitude (Bülow, Neubauer, et al., 2022) and in nature (i.e.,
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