Testing transactional processes between parental support and adolescent depressive symptoms: From a daily to a biennial timescale

Transactional processes between parental support and adolescents' depressive symptoms might differ in the short term versus long term. Therefore, this multi-sample study tested bidirectional within-family associations between perceived parental support and depressive symptoms in adolescents with datasets with varying measurement intervals: Daily (N = 244, M (age) = 13.8 years, 38% male), bi-weekly (N = 256, M (age) = 14.4 years, 29% male), three-monthly (N = 245, M (age) = 13.9 years, 38% male), annual (N = 1,664, M (age) = 11.1 years, 51% male), and biennial (N = 502, M (age) = 13.8 years, 48% male). Preregistered random-intercept cross-lagged panel models (RI-CLPMs) showed negative between- and within-family correlations. Moreover, although the preregistered models showed no within-family lagged effect from perceived parental support to adolescent depressive symptoms at any timescale, an exploratory model demonstrated a negative lagged effect at a biennial timescale with the annual dataset. Concerning the reverse within-family lagged effect, increases in adolescent depressive symptoms predicted decreases in perceived parental support 2 weeks and 3 months later (relationship erosion effect). Most cross-lagged effects were not moderated by adolescent sex or neuroticism trait level. Thus, the findings mostly support adolescent-driven effects at understudied timescales and illustrate that within-family lagged effects do not generalize across timescales.

Automated summary

Transactional processes between parental support and adolescents' depressive symptoms may differ in the short term versus long term. This study analyzed multiple datasets with varying measurement intervals and found bidirectional within-family associations between perceived parental support and depressive symptoms in adolescents. However, these associations varied depending on the measurement time interval.