Chapter 7 212 Despite this theoretical consensus, empirical knowledge on the heterogeneity across families in their dynamic processes between parenting and adolescent functioning is lacking considerably. That is, my systematic review (Chapter 2) revealed that less than half of the within-family studies (20 of the 46) that were published until the beginning of 2018 examined heterogeneity, mainly by assessing whether associations between parenting and adolescent functioning were moderated. To increase the empirical understanding of how parenting differentially impacts adolescents’ functioning across families and vice versa, I examined (aim 3a) the degree to which the dynamics between perceived parenting and adolescent functioning within families vary across families and (aim 3b) which adolescent characteristics could explain the observed heterogeneity. 3.1 Quantifying heterogeneity: Evidence that dynamic parenting processes are idiosyncratic. To understand to which extent dynamics between parenting and adolescent functioning within families differ across families, I examined whether these dynamics differed for subgroups of families or were either idiosyncratic. As a first step, in Chapter 3, I examined whether pre-defined subgroups of adolescents differed on average in their dynamic processes between parental support and depressive symptoms (i.e., first aggregate, then analyze). However, I found little evidence that the perceived dynamics between parental support and adolescent depressive symptoms were, on average, different for adolescent boys or girls and for subgroups of adolescents with low versus high trait levels of neuroticism. The lack of average subgroup differences found in Chapter 3 and in work of others (e.g., Vrolijk et al., 2020), might suggest that the dynamics between parenting and adolescent functioning are homogeneous across families. However, another possibility might be that large heterogeneity exists even within these pre-defined subgroups (Moeller, 2022). Comparing average subgroup-dynamics might thus be insufficient to understand how the dynamics of individual families differ from each other. Accordingly, more fine-grained analyses seem necessary to reveal heterogeneity that is potentially hiding behind subsample averages. To better understand the extent to which families differ in their dynamic parenting processes, I moved to an idionomic approach (i.e., first analyze, then aggregate; Moeller, 2022; Sanford et al., 2022). An idionomic approach combines a nomothetic (i.e., identifying generalizable patterns) and an idiographic approach (i.e., estimating effects for each
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