This revised application seeks continued support for a project now in its final year of funding. The primary purpose of the study, also known as the Iowa Youth and Families Project (IYEP), is to investigate personal, interactional, and contextual characteristics of rural parents and adolescents that promote successful adaptation and protect against emotional, somatic, or behavioral problems under conditions of economic stress. Since project initiation, 451 families have participated in a 4- wave panel study. Participants from each family include two parents, a seventh grader (the target adolescent), and a near-aged sibling. They were interviewed each winter in 1989, 1990, 1991, and 1992. These yearly in- home visits with the families involved about six hours of contact over two occasions with each of the four participating family members. They completed interviews an questionnaires which assessed psychological functioning, personality characteristics, interaction patterns in the family, the perceived quality of family relationships, personal achievements, behavioral problems, economic stresses and strains, extrafamilial social supports and conflicts, recent individual and family changes, and community characteristics. In addition, family members participated each year in approximately 1.5 hours of structured interaction tasks videotaped in their homes. Family interactions during these tasks have been coded by trained observers along a number of relevant theoretical dimensions including important interpersonal skills (e.g., problem solving effectiveness and childbearing strategies) and expressed emotional affect (e.g., hostility and warmth/supportiveness). These procedures have produced a rich data set, one which includes multiple informants and multiple methodologies designed to yield a comprehensive account of family functioning, individual well-being and stress processes. This prospective, 4-wave panel study allows us to chart the interdependencies among these multiple levels of assessment across time, thus strengthening inferences about the order of effects in tests of theoretical models. We are requesting three additional years of support for the analysis of these data and completion of the initial research plan. We will also address several new research aims with these analyses.
These aims i nclude consideration of individual and family developmental processes in addition to those associated with economic stress; evaluation of methodological issues with multi-informant longitudinal data, and comparative research with three other major studies of families employing similar methodological strategies. In this revised proposal, we respond to comments from the February, 1993 review related to: (1) analysis of subject attrition, (20 descriptions of samples for comparative studies, (3) procedures for replicative analyses, and 94) a budget-related timeline for completing research tasks.
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