Dynamic analyses of the interrelationship between mothers and daughters on a measure of depressive symptoms

Much prior research has attempted to analyze a reciprocal dynamic relationship between older parents and their adult children. Mothers are generally more invested in their children's lives and the relationship between mother and adult daughter has been shown to have more emotional ties than that between a mother and her adult son. The goals of this study are to explore the dynamic interrelationship between mother and daughter on depressive symptomatology using longitudinal data. The focal data are based on mothers (mean age = 56) and their biological daughters (mean age = 32) from the University of Southern California's Longitudinal Study of Generations (LSOG). Four kinds of structural equation model (SEM) analyses are presented in order of complexity and each are designed to develop and test specific dynamic structural equation model hypotheses. The model fits of varying dynamic cross-lagged SEMs are compared for goodness-of-fit to various forms of the LSOG data. An initial two-time point regression based model suggests an adult daughter's depressive affect to be a leading indicator of her older mother's depressive symptoms. However, more complex models using more of the available data and advances in measurement models suggest the directionality of such developmental processes are not so simple or uniform. Substantive results are discussed as they pertain to all the models in the paper.