Quantifying Cohesion in Parent-child Relationships
Dr. Kirby Deater-Deckard, Professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and his team have completed their research, “Quantifying cohesion in the parent-child relationship in a complex family system.” In this project they developed several methods and tools for operationalizing parent-child/teen [3- 16yrs old] cohesion (e.g. closeness, communication) in their relationships, by examining "similarity" in and "consistency" of relational/social behavior to identify patterns that promote or impede cohesion and that may influence mental and behavioral health.
They assessed these variables from both cross-sectional and longitudinal perspectives. The cross-sectional study included 153 mothers and their 3-7yr old children located in rural, suburban, and small-urban Appalachian areas in southwest Virginia. The longitudinal study included 224 to 277 (depending in the variables being examined) mother-child pairs at 4, 6 and 9 years of age in rural to urban areas in southwest Virginia and northwest North Carolina. There also were additional analyses of over 1000 families living in 9 countries of children from 8-13 years of age. Measures included observed behavior (based on coding of video recorded parent-child interactions), and parent/self-report surveys.
The First Research Question was, “How much between-family variation is there in parent-child similarity (within each pair), and consistency (over time) in their relational behaviors (e.g., engagement, control, warmth, hostility)—and can this variation be assessed reliably?”
Similarity- The data showed very substantial variation between families in mother-child similarity.
Consistency- Although Dr. Deater-Deckard and his team expected to see a degree of within-person variability over time in the parent-child/adolescent relationship, they were very surprised by the magnitude of the variability. For instance, in one sample of families and young adolescents in the US (a diverse sample with equal numbers of Black, Latine and White families), from half to nearly two thirds of the observed differences between families in harsh vs warm parenting at any given point in time was found to vary within parent-child dyads across four or five annual waves of assessment. A very similar pattern of substantial amounts of within-family variation in parent-youth relations over time was also seen in the data from eight other countries.
The Second Research question was, “Is the variability in parent-child similarity and consistency (Question 1) linked with variation in the parent’s and child’s mental and behavioral health and functioning (eg. anxious/depressive symptoms, aggression, temperament, physiological functioning?
Similarity- Having computed the dyad-level similarity for observed behaviors and emotions during their interactions, they were tested whether and to what degree that between-dyad variation in similarity covaried with a variety of indicators of each dyad-partner’s functioning. The majority of their analyses so far have focused on the mother’s and child’s temperament, and the results indicate a robust association between greater mother-child behavioral/affective similarity, and better temperament-based emotion and behavioral regulation (and attention regulation in particular) in both partners. Interestingly, this was not the case for emotion aspects of mother and child temperament; those were unrelated to the level of dyad similarity in behaviors/emotions during interaction with each other. Our current working hypothesis based on this finding is that both partners’ degree of regulation of attention to each other during their interactions contributes to the dyad’s level of coordinated behavioral and affective matching- an important component of coherent and supportive communication in the parent-child dyad.
Consistency- They then tested whether the amount of within-person consistency/variability predicted important developmental outcomes for the youth. Their analysis focused on internalizing and externalizing behavioral and emotional problems (eg. conduct problems, anxiety/depression symptoms.)
They found a strong positive association between higher levels of within family variability (ie. less consistency) in parental environment (specifically parental acceptance vs. rejection of the adolescent) and higher levels of youth internalizing and externalizing symptoms. The estimated effect across nine countries indicated some degree of replication of the effects across remarkably distinct contexts- although these effects were not found in every country (eg. Sweden).
The Third Research Question was, “Do the results from Questions 1 and 2 vary across a range of child/adolescent ages, genders, cultural groups and family socioeconomic status levels?” The researchers were not able to fully study this question due to inadequate statistical power. However, these are important moderators of the effects that were studied, and they plan to address these variables in future projects.