Abstract
Nuanced understanding of adolescents’ interpersonal relationships with family and peers is important for developing more personalized interventions that prevent problem behaviors and adjustment issues. We used latent profile analysis (LPA) to classify a community sample of 784 adolescents with respect to their observed relationship dynamics with friends and family using videotaped observations and five-minute audiotaped speech samples collected at ages 16–17. The resulting latent classes served to predict behavioral and emotional health in early adulthood. The LPA of the video- and audio-coded observational variables revealed a three-class model: (1) the healthy relationship group (n = 587), representing low levels of deviant and drug use talk with friends and positive, noncoercive relationship with parents; (2) the disaffected group (n = 90), representing high levels of drug use talk with friends and negativity about their parent(s) in the five-minute speech sample; and (3) the antisocial group (n = 107), representing high levels of deviant talk, drug use talk, coercive joining with friends, and coerciveness in family interactions. In contrast to the healthy relationship group, the disaffected group showed elevated risk for substance use problems and depression and the antisocial group showed higher risk for substance use problems and committing violent crimes in early adulthood. Outcome differences between disaffected and antisocial groups were mostly nonsignificant. We discuss the viability of applying these findings to tailoring and personalizing family-based interventions with adolescents to address key dynamics in the family and friendship relationships to prevent adult substance use problems, depression, and violence.
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Notes
This is a youth report of antisocial behavior at ages 16–17 used in other published studies (e.g., Van Ryzin and Dishion 2014). It is an average score of nine items that assess antisocial behaviors (e.g., frequency of lying to parents, hitting or threatening school peers, engaging in theft or vandalism, and having gang members as friends). The Cronbach’s alpha of this measure was 0.73.
We had to use the manual 3-step approach for LPA. The new 3-step approach (Asparouhov and Muthén 2013) was not feasible in this study because the outcome variables were latent variables. It is not yet possible to specify a latent variable in this approach.
Predictors of class membership are variables that predict the class membership without influencing outcome of LPA whereas indicators of LPA are variables that are included to identify unknown clusters of individuals.
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Funding
A grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (5R01DA07031) and a grant from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse & Alcoholism (5R01AA022071) provided funding for this project and supported the authors for their work on this paper.
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Dr. Dishion was the developer of the Family Check-Up model, which was key to this research. However, the impact of intervention was not the topic of this study, and therefore, there is no conflict of interest. All authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.
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The Institutional Review Boards at the University of Oregon and the Oregon Research Institute approved all research procedures. All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.
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Dishion, T.J., Mun, C.J., Ha, T. et al. Observed Family and Friendship Dynamics in Adolescence: a Latent Profile Approach to Identifying “Mesosystem” Adaptation for Intervention Tailoring. Prev Sci 20, 41–55 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11121-018-0927-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11121-018-0927-0