Savannah Boele

1 General introduction 27 3. AIMS AND OUTLINE OF THIS DISSERTATION To address the three described methodological gaps in the parenting literature (i.e., gaps pertaining to the within-family level, timescales, and heterogeneity across families) and to increase the empirical understanding of the dynamic processes between parenting and adolescent functioning within families, this dissertation had three aims. The first aim was to examine how key dimensions of parenting (i.e., warmth, autonomy support, behavioral control, and ps ychological control) are (on average) reciprocally associated with adolescent functioning at the within-family level. The second aim was to examine within-family associations between parenting and adolescent functioning on various timescales. The third aim was to quantify and explain heterogeneity across families in within-family associations between parenting and adolescent functioning. To achieve these aims, I conducted five studies: one systematic literature review (Chapter 2) and four empirical studies (Chapters 3-6; for a visualization of the empirical studies see Figure 5). These five studies are described below and summarized in Table 2. To obtain an overview of the available empirical insights into the dynamic processes between parenting and adolescent functioning within families, I first conducted a systematic literature review in Chapter 2. Here I summarize the small existing body of studies that examined the within-family linkages between parenting and adolescent functioning. This systematic overview exposed significant gaps in the literature, in terms of the studied dimensions, timescales, and heterogeneity. These gaps were further addressed in four empirical studies. In Chapter 3, a multiple-timescale study is presented. Specifically, I investigated whether the average processes between perceived parental support and adolescent depressive symptoms varied across timescales. I used five datasets with different time intervals, from a daily to a biennial time interval, to estimate cross-lagged effects between parental support and depressive symptoms (see Table 2). Additionally, I examined the potential heterogeneity in these effects by studying average subgroup differences based on adolescent characteristics: differences between girls and boys and between adolescents with low and high levels of trait neuroticism. In Chapter 4, I tested environmental sensitivity models at the individual family level. According to these models, some adolescents are more sensitive to supportive and/or unsupportive parenting than others. I tested whether such different responsivity patterns

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