Session: Applying Innovative Longitudinal Methods to Examine the Role of Parents in Promoting Adjustment in Youth (Society for Prevention Research 22nd Annual Meeting)

Parents have a significant impact on children’s development and their formation of positive peer relationships. As a result, parents are often the target of preventive interventions aimed at reducing youths’ risk for displaying aggressive and deviant behavior problems. Many of the extant interventions have focused on parental monitoring and communication as well as parent involvement in education.  Yet, less is known about the dynamic process between youth, parents, and schools over time. This panel uses innovative longitudinal statistical methods, including latent transition analysis and autoregressive latent trajectory modeling, to analyze different aspects of the parenting process. Each study draws on data from a randomized controlled trial in order to examine the complex transactional processes that occur between youth and their parents (Pardini, 2008). The first paper analyzes child- and parent-reported data on solicitation and control from the longitudinal, multi-site Fast Track trial. Bidirectional findings provide evidence that increased parental solicitation deters children from conduct problems in subsequent years, when youth are at greatest risk for engaging in conduct problems. These associations suggest that short-term interventions to improve parental solicitation might be effective in deterring child conduct problems in the next year. The second study draws upon data from a 37-school study to explore family functioning and perceived parental messages about fighting and nonviolence in relation to youth risk factors and adolescent aggression. Adopting an ecological framework, this paper explores risk factors such as deviant peer affiliation, school norms supporting aggression, and exposure to community violence. The longitudinal analyses indicate that family factors did not serve to protect children that experienced higher levels of risk for aggression. The third study narrows the focus on the school context by examining the effects of the Incredible Years Teacher Classroom Management program on teacher perceptions of parent contact and comfort. Latent transition analysis yielded four patterns of involvement over time. Subsequent analyses determined that the intervention classrooms were significantly more likely to shift into adaptive parenting profiles at follow-up compared to control classroom parents. Taken together, these three studies inform our understanding of the dynamic process between youth, parents, and the school and community context which may put some youth at risk for engaging in aggressive and problem behaviors. Implications of these longitudinal findings for the development and refinement of ecologically-sensitive, parent-focused preventive interventions will be discussed.