1 General introduction 23 psychological control and adolescent depressive symptoms indicates that increases in psychological control are related to same-time increases in adolescents’ depressive symptoms within families (see Figure 3). To assess such within-family bivariate associations, (intensive) longitudinal data needs to be analyzed using statistical methods that can disentangle stable between-family variance from over-time within-family variance (see Table 1) (Hamaker et al., 2015; Lucas, 2023). In contrast to between-family analyses that can already be conducted with only one “snapshot” per family, within-family analyses need (few to many) repeated measures per family. Applying a within-family approach thus requires a more intensive and expensive data collection. Moreover, analyzing (intensive) longitudinal data at the within-family level requires advanced statistical techniques, many of which had yet to be developed a decade ago (Asparouhov et al., 2018; Hamaker et al., 2015, 2018), and some still have to be released today (Asparouhov et al., 2017). Because of these practical, financial, and statistical drawbacks, empirical studies applying a within-family design are not yet standard practice in the empirical study of parenting adolescents. Although modern statistical and technological innovations have facilitated the application of within-family designs (Repetti et al., 2015; Van Roekel et al., 2019), within-family studies are still overshadowed by many between-family studies. To illustrate, at the beginning of this PhD project, only 46 studies were available that examined within-family associations between parenting and adolescent functioning (see Chapter 2; Boele et al., 2020). These 46 within-family studies stand in stark contrast to the hundreds of studies included in meta-analyses that assessed between-family correlations (e.g., Pinquart, 2017a, 2017b). Therefore, many meta-theoretical ideas about the dynamic processes between parenting and adolescent functioning (for a summary, see Figure 1) have remained untested at the correct ecological level, the within-family level. This dissertation started to fill this gap by conducting four empirical parenting studies at the within-family level by using six datasets from five different samples (Chapters 3-6). 2.2 The second gap: Dynamics might not generalize across timescales A second gap in the empirical parenting literature concerns the fact that the dynamic processes between parenting and adolescent functioning are often empirically studied on a macro-timescale. That is, despite modern theories of human development and parenting propose that dynamic parenting processes unfold on various timescales (see Figure 2), the limited work of within-family studies has mostly tested how parenting and adolescent
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