Chapter 6 192 affect across the whole sample, individual families demonstrated on average 2.4 temporal associations between parenting practices on the one hand and adolescent positive or negative affect on the other. For instance, in one family, the adolescent experienced more negative affect when perceiving their parent to be stricter that day, whereas in another family, the adolescent experienced more negative affect when perceiving their parents to be more psychologically controlling (and not when stricter; see Figure 5). Additionally, how perceived parenting was related to adolescent affective well-being also varied across families. Family-specific associations differed in strength, sign (i.e., positive versus negative), and timescale (i.e., on the same or the following day). For example, increased parental strictness predicted more negative affect on the same day in 10 families, with family-specific effect sizes ranging from .26 to .63, and increased parental strictness predicted more next-day negative affect in two families but less next-day negative affect in two other families. Thus, the findings are consistent with the developmental principle of multifinality (Cicchetti & Rogosch, 1996), such that the same parenting practice showed differential effects on adolescent affect. Together, the present study and other idiographic studies in the broader field of psychology (e.g., Bouwmans et al., 2018; Kelly et al., 2020) offer empirical evidence for the widely held assumption that psychological heterogeneity is an inherent and universal characteristic of human functioning (Richters, 2021). To understand why the nature of daily parent-adolescent dynamics was heterogeneous across families, a variety of moderators were tested. Specifically, it was tested whether the extent to which parenting-affect associations contributed to the overall family-specific network (i.e., parenting-affect density) could be predicted by mean levels of daily parenting and affect, demographic (i.e., age, sex, education), psychological functioning (i.e., depressive and anxiety symptoms, and self-esteem), legitimacy beliefs of parental authority, and personality traits (i.e., environmental sensitivity and neuroticism). However, none of the moderators were significantly related to parenting-affect density. One explanation for the lack of moderator effects might be that it is the complex interplay of numerous characteristics at multiple levels that shape a family’s unique dynamics (Bronfenbrenner, 2005). Future studies should investigate whether family-specific dynamics can be explained by the interplay between a broad range of individual and contextual characteristics. Practical Implications This family-specific study is another demonstration of the methodological concern that between-family patterns, such as research on parenting styles (Kuppens & Ceulemans,
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