Parental Support, Psychological Control and Behavioral Control: Assessing Relevance Across Time, Culture and Method

What can parents, and others interested in adolescents, do to facilitate their healthy development? In many decades of work, researchers have continually identified three central dimensions of parenting: support, behavioral control, and psychological control, all of which have been associated consistently with either positive or negative indicators of adolescent functioning. Notwithstanding its volume, the research has been non specific as to the effects of these dimensions and has otherwise been limited by a predominant concentration on western families. This monograph reported on research that addressed these limitations by testing specific effects of the parenting dimensions and by doing with multiple analytic techniques on data from adolescents in 11 cultures across the world. In al sites, it was found that support was associated with higher adolescent social competence and lower depression; psychological control with higher depression and antisocial behavior; and behavioral control with lower antisocial behavior. Recommendations included considering that these dimensions are the parental contribution to relationship types or socialization conditions that, when achieved, (with parents or other significant person) are responsible for the effects.

Brian K. Barber is Professor of Child and Family Studies, Adjunct Professor of Psychology, and Founding Director, the Center for the Study of Youth and Political Violence, at the University of Tennessee. He received his Ph.D. from Brigham Young University in 1987. His interests’ center on understanding the social, cultural, and political contexts of adolescent development. This Monograph culminates his effort to more precisely understand the parenting context of adolescent functioning, by synthesizing, clarifying, and refining past research, and by testing its parameters across the diversity of family experience internationally. The end goal of those pursuits is to provide useful, but manageable, information to the variety of caregivers, educators, practitioners, and policy makers who have adolescents as their concern.

Heidi E. Stolz is Assistant Professor of Child and Family Studies at the University of Tennessee. She received her Ph.D. from Brigham Young University in 2002. Her interests include refining research on the parent–child relationship with a special interest in clarifying the effects of mothers and fathers, and in maximizing the utility of research for application in child and family programs and their evaluation. She is fully responsible for Chapters VI and VII of this Monograph in which she introduces, tests, and interprets dominance analysis as an innovative method for analyzing parenting data. She also participated in the writing of Chapter VIII and in editing the full manuscript.

Joseph A. Olsen is Assistant Dean, the College of Family, Home, and Social Sciences at Brigham Young University.He received his Ph.D. from Brigham Young University in 1994. His interests center on the quantitative study of human development, personal relationships, and social interaction, with a particular focus on using structural equation and multilevel models to study small groups and microsocial contexts. He conducted all of the empirical analyses in Chapters IV and Vof this Monograph, he consulted on the analyses reported on in Chapters VI and VII, and he assisted in editing the manuscript.

W. Andrew Collins (Ph.D., Stanford University, 1971) is professor at the Institute of Child Development, University of Minnesota. He has written widely about parent–adolescent relationships and influences during adolescence and peer and romantic relationships during adolescence and early
adulthood. In collaboration with Byron Egeland and L. Alan Sroufe, he is engaged in longitudinal research on social relationships and influences from birth to adulthood. He is a past president of the Society for Research on Adolescence and past secretary of the Society for Research in Child Development.

Margaret Burchinal is the Director of the Design and Statistical Computing Unit at the FPG Child Development Institute and is a Research Professor in the Psychology. She has served as the primary statistician for many educational studies of early childhood, including the 11-state Pre-Kindergarten Evaluation for the National Center for Early Learning and Development, the longitudinal study of 1300 children in NICHD Study of Early Child Care; the four-state evaluation of child care in the Cost, Quality, and Child Outcomes Study. As an applied methodologist, she has helped to demonstrate that sophisticated methods such as meta-analysis (Burchinal, Peisner-Feinberg, Bryant, & Clifford, 2000), fixed-effect modeling (NICHD ECCRN & Duncan, 2003), hierarchical linear modeling, piecewise regression (Campbell, Pungello, Miller-Johnson, Burchinal, & Ramey, 2001), and generalized estimating equations provide educational researchers with advanced techniques to address important educational issues.