By taking advantage of a unique, ongoing longitudinal study of some 1,000 young adults at age 26 (and their parents) in New Zealand who have been studied since age 3, this work is designed to advance understanding of the development of parent-child relationships across the lifespan. These young adults will be queried during a 20-minute interview about their relationships with their parents (at the current time) so that information on the emotional closeness of these relationships and the help received and provided to parents can be related to data collected prospectively during early childhood (ages 3 and 5), middle childhood (ages 7 and 9) and adolescence (ages 13 and 15) on parent-child relations and family climate. Parallel data on intergenerational relations during adulthood will be gathered by mail from the parents of the young adults so that multi-respondent, multi-indicator constructs of affectional, functional, and associational solidarity (between parent and adult child) can be created for use in structural equation modeling designed to assess, prospectively, direct and mediated effects of childhood experience on intergenerational relations in adulthood. Because there exists no such prospective studies of this subject originating in early childhood, this study of New Zealanders will break new ground in the study of the life course.
| Belsky, Jay; Jaffee, Sara R; Caspi, Avshalom et al. (2003) Intergenerational relationships in young adulthood and their life course, mental health, and personality correlates. J Fam Psychol 17:460-71 |
| Belsky, J; Jaffee, S; Hsieh, K H et al. (2001) Child-rearing antecedents of intergenerational relations in young adulthood: a prospective study. Dev Psychol 37:801-13 |
