The proposed study examines family contributions to adolescent social development using developmentally-sensitive, observational measures of family interactions and relating these to state-of-the-art indices of adolescent social development. This study further refines and applies a newly developed system for assessing interactions that promote or inhibit autonomy and relatedness in families with adolescents, which was designed to take advantage of a rich available longitudinal data set. Autonomy and relatedness have been frequently characterized as central dimensions of adolescent social development, although these dimensions have not previously been studied over time using observational data. This study assesses these dimensions longitudinally in adolescents' and parents' interactions with each other and examines their connection with current and future aspects of adolescent social development. Existing data will be used for 75 adolescents and their two-parent families for year 1 of the study and 65 adolescents and families at year 3. Adolescents were approximately evenly distributed between males and females and between psychiatrically hospitalized, non-psychotic, non-organically impaired adolescents and a demographically matched group of adolescents in a public high school. The Autonomy and Relatedness Coding System will be applied to audiotaped, transcribed family interaction data generated each year using a revealed differences task, and related to existing data on adolescent ego development, self-esteem and self-image complexity, also collected longitudinally. This study addresses four major research goals: 1) to enhance and further demonstrate the reliability and validity of the Autonomy and Relatedness Coding System; 2) to examine the concurrent relationship of parents' behaviors which promote or inhibit autonomy and relatedness and their adolescents' levels of ego development, self-esteem and self-image complexity; 3) to examine the change and stability in autonomy and relatedness in family interactions over a two-year period; and, 4) to examine links between parental behaviors in interactions with their adolescent and that adolescent's psychosocial development over the following two years.
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