Chapter 3 94 RESULTS Descriptive Statistics The descriptive statistics for each dataset can be found in Appendix A. Regarding the correlations at the between-family level, perceived parental support correlated negatively with adolescent depressive symptoms in four of the five datasets (rs between -.12 and -.50, ps < .001; n.s. in the biennial dataset). This indicates that adolescents who perceived lower levels of parental support also experienced more depressive symptoms on average compared to adolescents who experienced higher levels of parental support. Moreover, in all datasets, adolescent neuroticism correlated positively with depressive symptoms (rs between .17 and .69, ps ≤ .008). Thus, adolescents scoring higher on neuroticism also reported more depressive symptoms than adolescents scoring lower on neuroticism. Adolescent neuroticism correlated negatively with parental support only in the bi-weekly and annual datasets (rs -.10 and -.26, ps ≤ .022), suggesting that adolescents scoring higher on neuroticism scored on average lower on parental support than adolescents scoring lower on neuroticism. Furthermore, concerning sex differences, girls scored on average significantly higher on perceived parental support, depressive symptoms, and neuroticism in most datasets (see Tables A1-A5 in Appendix A). Both perceived parental support and adolescent depressive symptoms varied over time within families. The intraclass correlations (ICCs) of parental support ranged from .44 to .80 and for adolescent depressive symptoms from .46 to .79 (see Tables A1-A5 in Appendix A). This indicates for parental support, for example, that 44% to 80% of the variance was due to stable differences between adolescents and 20% to 56% of the variance was due to overtime fluctuations within adolescents. Concurrent and Cross-Lagged Within-Family Effects The model fit of all single-group RI-CLPMs was acceptable (see Table 2) and parameter estimates of each model can be found in Table 3. Our hypothesis (H1) was that there would be negative within-family correlations between perceived parental support and adolescent depressive symptoms. Such correlated fluctuations were found at a bi-weekly to biennial timescale (rs = -.09 to -.76, ps ≤ .007). Thus, supporting our first hypothesis, when adolescents perceived declines in parental support, they simultaneously reported increases in depressive symptoms. The only timescale that did not have a significant within-family correlation was the daily timescale.
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