Date of Award

1-1-2021

Language

English

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

College/School/Department

Department of Educational and Counseling Psychology

Program

Educational Psychology and Methodology

Content Description

1 online resource (vii, 81 pages) : illustrations.

Dissertation/Thesis Chair

Gabriel Schlomer

Committee Members

Melissa Lippold, Hung-Bin Sheu

Keywords

adolescent aggression, parent gender, parent-adolescent positive affective quality, parental knowledge, parental monitoring, Aggressiveness in adolescence, Parent and teenager, Parenting, Communication in families, Mother and child, Father and child

Subject Categories

Developmental Psychology | Educational Psychology

Abstract

Research with a focus on adolescent aggression often measures parental monitoring and parental knowledge interchangeably. However, parental monitoring refers to parent-driven behaviors that are related but distinct from parental knowledge. Mixed measures of parental monitoring and parental knowledge may lead to misunderstanding about how these parenting behaviors are related to adolescent aggression. This study aims to uncover the possible unique associations between adolescent aggression and parental monitoring as well as parental knowledge by 1) distinguishing the measure of parental monitoring from the measure of parental knowledge and 2) simultaneously controlling for these two dimensions of parenting with each other. Five-wave multi-informant PROSPER data (N = 977, age 11.5 to 15 years, 52% female) were used to provide an opportunity for exploring potential different effects of mothering and fathering on adolescent aggression. The autoregressive latent trajectory model was used to examine the associations between parenting and adolescent aggression, in order to take the development in parenting and adolescent aggression during early- to mid-adolescence into account. The results show that bidirectional association between maternal knowledge and adolescent aggression was found but in a surprising way, such that maternal knowledge predicted more adolescent aggression at subsequent ages and adolescent aggression predicted more maternal knowledge at subsequent ages. Both maternal monitoring and paternal monitoring were found to predict more adolescent aggression at later ages, and no opposite direction of association was found. The majority of associations between parenting and adolescent aggression were found for mothers. In addition, high mother-adolescent affective quality was found to have a protective effect against adolescent aggression in which context maternal monitoring predicted less adolescent aggression. Practical implications on intervening adolescent aggression are discussed.

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