Chapter 3 80 To summarize, two qualitatively different transactional cycles between parental support and adolescent depressive symptoms are suggested here, depending on the timescale. In the short term, a decrease in parental support is expected to be followed by a temporary increase in the adolescents’ depressive symptoms, which may trigger an adaptive response of parents by providing more support than they would typically do. In the long term, however, we expect a negative reciprocal process. That is, the elevated depressive symptoms of the adolescent following upon the preceding decrease in parental support, might subsequently erode the parent-child relationship and lead to a further decrease in parental support. Thus, the transactional within-family process between parental support and adolescent depressive symptoms might be sensitive to the timescale of study. The current study examined these hypothesized short-term and long-term transactional processes from the perspective of the adolescent. Although we would theoretically expect that parents actual support fluctuates as a response to changes in adolescents’ depressive symptoms, as described above, the question remains whether adolescents also perceive these changes in parental support. Research shows that perceptions of parenting can differ between parents and adolescents: Some adolescent experience similar levels of parental support as their parents, but other adolescents experience more or less parental support than their parents (L. H. C. Janssen, Elzinga, et al., 2021). In the current study, we thus examined whether short-term increases and long-term decreases (indicating relationship erosion processes) in supportive parenting are perceived by adolescents after they experienced an increase in depressive symptoms. Methodological Concerns Regarding Timescales Each time interval between observations may illustrate one snapshot of a continuous time process, which is known to be often non-linearly linked over time (Granic, 2005; Smith & Thelen, 2003). Methodologically, it has also been acknowledged that results on one timescale may not be generalizable to another timescale (Keijsers & Van Roekel, 2018). That is, when the same data-structures are analyzed with varying time intervals, the results, including the direction (i.e., from parental support to depressive symptoms or vice versa), sign (i.e., positive or negative), and the size of the effects, may depend on the arbitrary choice of the time interval (Kuiper & Ryan, 2018; Voelkle et al., 2018). Therefore, to study how the hypothesized transactional processes of parenting unfold within families over time, we need a multitude of “snapshots”: from short-term daily studies to long-term panel studies spanning years. To get a first insight into how the transactional processes
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