During the stressful adolescent period, family intimacy is a particularly critical factor that is worth investigaing. To strengthen the cogency and validity cross studies, researchers tend to collect data from both parents and adolescents. However, informants often differ in their reports, either in family environments or adolescents' developmental outcomes, which are traditionally regarded as measurement errors. However, recent research has suggested that such informant discrepancy is meaningful in adolescent development, as it is a valuable indicator of family relationship, and reveals potential differences in world views and communication problems.
From this perspective, some studies have dug into informant discrepancies in family intimacy, yet the literature is insufficient and results were inconsistent. Moreover, researchers often adopted the difference-score method, predicting developmental outcomes with the absolute difference between parental and adolescents' assessments. However, this method is statistically redundant, and does not take into consideration the direction of difference. To overcome these issues, researchers recommend the use of polynomial regression, which provides a more detailed analysis of the effect of informant discrepancies. Further, response surface analysis could help to visualize the relations among parental report, adolescent report, and outcome variables, giving a vivid illustration on the linearity and direction of their relationship. Thus, this study examined the informant discrepancy between parents and adolescents, and further explored the link between such discrepancy and adolescent problem behaviors.
The current study aimed to examine the existence of informant (in)congruence in family intimacy under Chinese Culture, and further investigate the relationship between parental-adolescent (in)congruence in family intimacy and adolescent loneliness and aggression. We recruited 1136 intact Chinese families with children attending elementary school or middle high school, who answered questionnaires, including the family functioning scale, the trait aggression scale, and the loneliness scale. Then polynomial regression and response surface analysis were conducted to detect (in)congruence in reports of family intimacy between parents and adolescents, and its linkage to adolescents' loneliness and aggression. Besides, we separated male and female subsamples in our analysis to explore potential gender differences in the relations among family intimacy and loneliness and aggression.
The results indicated that: (1) Parents and adolescents differed in their reports of family intimacy, and parents tended to have higher levels of family intimacy. (2) Parent-adolescent congruence in family intimacy was negatively linked to adolescent loneliness and aggression, both for girls and boys. (3) Parent-adolescent incongruence in family intimacy was linked to adolescent loneliness and aggression, and the relations differed in adolescent girls and boys. With incongruence between adolescents and parents, adolescents' report was more strongly related to aggression, especially for boys. Specifically, higher levels of family intimacy were associated with boys' low levels of aggression only when reported by boys(rather than parents). But when reported by parents or girls, higher family intimacy had a protective value.
This study reveals the existence of parent-adolescent (in)congruence in family intimacy and its relation to adolescent development in mainland Chinese families. It implies the significance of adolescents' views and feelings to their development, which sometimes are even more influential than parents' perceptions. Thus, practically speaking, interventions should pay more attention to adolescents themselves. Also, as research on parent-child (in)congruence has profound meanings on adolescents' clinical and developmental research, further investigation is needed.
Key words
parent-adolescent discrepancies /
family intimacy /
loneliness /
aggression /
adolescent
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