Examining bidirectional relationships between parental socialization behaviors and adolescent alcohol misuse across early and middle adolescence

While numerous studies have examined the influence of parenting on adolescent alcohol use, relatively few have examined how adolescents influence parental behavior or the reciprocal nature of parent-adolescent behavior relative to alcohol use. Jointly guided by socialization theories and transactional models of development, the purpose of this dissertation was to examine reciprocal effects between parental socialization behaviors and adolescent alcohol misuse across early and middle adolescence. The study assessed bidirectional relationships between adolescent alcohol misuse and three general parental socialization behaviors (closeness, support, behavioral control), three alcohol-specific socialization behaviors (alcohol-specific monitoring, negative and permissive communication messages about alcohol) and parental alcohol use. To address developmental considerations underlying parent-adolescent relationships, the study also examined the stability and change of the reciprocal relations across early and middle adolescence. Data were from 1645 parent-adolescent dyads drawn from a longitudinal study of adolescent health risk behaviors spanning grades 6 through 10. A multivariate latent curve model with structured residuals, an extension of the autoregressive latent trajectory model, was used to test study hypotheses. This model was chosen to disaggregate developmental processes underlying the proposed relationships that occur across parent-adolescent dyads and over time within each dyad. Results suggest that increased adolescent alcohol misuse leads to greater alcohol-specific monitoring behaviors by parents across all grades. This finding substantiates the theoretical expectation that parental behavior is partially determined by the actions of their child, the direction of influence often left out of previous socialization research. No other relations between adolescent alcohol misuse and parental socialization behaviors were found after accounting for underlying developmental processes and necessary controls. While the few significant results limit implications for practice, results from this study provide a basis for future research to examine more dynamic transactional processes between parents and adolescents relative to alcohol use.