| Parents play a large role in shaping adolescent behavior. Specifically, how much parents monitor their children has been shown to have marked impact on adolescent health behaviors, including problem behaviors such as antisocial behavior and substance use. This dissertation examined whether similar patterns of self-reported parental monitoring and adolescent cigarette use would be found among adolescents in a longitudinal, randomized, multi-community intervention study, Project SixTeen. Additionally, though adolescents have been found to be relatively reliable self-reporters of problem behavior, research has produced mixed results regarding the reliability of parent report; therefore, analyses also focused on addressing the agreement between adolescents and parents in this sample.;Linear and generalized-linear mixed-effects models were used to assess the patterns of parental monitoring and adolescent cigarette use in a longitudinal subset of 654 adolescents. Consistent with hypotheses, levels of parental monitoring were found to decrease over four years, adolescent cigarette use was found to increase, and lower levels of parental monitoring predicted higher levels of adolescent cigarette use. Similar patterns were found in multilevel analyses involving data from 6060 adolescents with two years of data each. Analyses of parent report data showed that parents consistently and significantly reported higher levels of parental monitoring than their adolescents. Agreement on cigarette use varied; additionally, relatively few parents were aware of the positive smoking status of their children.;These results provide support for the idea that parental monitoring in adolescence is a powerful protective factor that requires flexibility and re-evaluation to accommodate changes in adolescence. Results also suggest that, while parental monitoring is important in the prevention of substance use, it can also have a substantial impact on adolescent health. Communities, in particular, can he instrumental in reducing the occurrence and impact of adolescent health risk behaviors. |
