Savannah Boele

1 General introduction 25 To illuminate potential heterogeneity, the first approach may be to apply a groupdifferential approach. That is, to test whether the dynamic processes between parenting and adolescent functioning differ between subgroups. This can be done by estimating moderator effects or by a multi-group approach in SEM, for instance, which requires a relatively small number of assessments and moderate sample sizes (e.g., t = 30, with N = 300; see Table 1). By applying this approach, one can assess whether the dynamic parenting processes vary from subgroup to subgroup, as several theoretical perspectives have been proposed (see 1.6). For example, in Chapter 2, I assessed whether the average reciprocal time-lagged associations between perceived parental support and adolescent depressive symptoms varied between adolescent boys and girls, or between adolescents with low and high trait levels of neuroticism. Nonetheless, the dynamic processes between parenting and adolescent functioning may still vary among families that belong to the same predefined subgroup (e.g., female vs. male adolescents) (Moeller et al., 2022). Therefore, a more fine-grained approach is warranted to uncover the heterogeneity that potentially hides behind sub-sample averages. Such a fine-grained approach is an idiographic approach. Using an idiographic approach, the dynamic processes between parenting and adolescent functioning are estimated at the individual-family level: for each individual family separately. Although many scholars have stressed that humans function, develop, and interact with their environment in idiosyncratic ways (Bronfenbrenner, 2005; Harris, 2006; Richters, 2021), modeling idiosyncratic dynamic parenting processes in adolescence has rarely been applied in parenting studies. In fact, idiographic studies on parenting adolescents were lacking at the start of this PhD project (see Chapter 2: Boele et al., 2020; but see Molenaar & Campbell, 2009), which might be due to the required intensive longitudinal data and the application of state-of-the-art advanced statistical techniques (see Table 1). To start filling this gap and to examine the dynamic processes between key dimensions of parenting and adolescent functioning at the level of the individual family, this dissertation applied an idiographic (or family-specific) approach in three empirical studies (Chapters 4-6). Specifically, 26 bi-weekly assessments of 256 Dutch families and 100 daily diaries of 159 Dutch families were collected (for an example time series, see Figure 4 below) and analyzed using DSEM (Chapters 4 & 5) and GIMME (Chapter 6). One criticism of the idiographic approach is that it may undermine generalization (Beltz et al., 2016). Because of the detailed family-specific results, it might be challenging to illuminate the extent to which the dynamic parenting processes of individual families are unique or shared by most or some families. However, state-of-the-art methods have

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