Parent-Child Perceptions of Parental Behavioral Control Through Rule-Setting for Risky Health Choices During Adolescence

Abstract

This study of 164 parent-child dyads compared perceptions of the rule-setting processes during the child's adolescence surrounding reported rules for the risky health domains of sexual activity, alcohol use, and tobacco use. Two kinds of rules were identified: abstinence rules and contingency rules. Tobacco use was largely dominated by abstinence rules, whereas sexual activity and alcohol featured both abstinence and contingency rules. Parents perceived that they communicated rules more directly and with greater justification than their adolescents reported, especially for abstinence rules. Parents perceived that their adolescents complied with their rules more so than the adolescents reported complying, especially for abstinence rules. Across health domains, perceptions of rule justification and rule sanctioning predicted perceptions of adolescent rule compliance.

Notes

¹Two trained coders determined parent-child intersubjective agreement for each generated rule using a 5-point scale in which 0 = “the other person did not put anything even close to this in their list of rules for this health domain”; 2 = “there is some similarity in content to the other's rule, but also some difference”; and 4 = “the content of the rule is the same and the wording of the rule is virtually the same.” Mean scores were near, or exceeded, the midpoint of judged intersubjective agreement on the 0 – 4 scale. Coder reliability was assessed on a randomly selected 10% of the parent-child dyads, producing a correlation value of .90 (p < .0001). Mean intersubjective agreement scores were derived for a given participant by averaging across all of the identified abstinence rules and all of identified contingency rules for each health domain. We compared parent to child scores separately for abstinence rules and contingency rules for each health domain using a two‐tailed paired t-test; thus, six parallel analyses were conducted. An adjusted alpha level of .008 was used (.05/6). For the sexual activity domain, parents (M = 2.41; SD = 1.42) and their children (M = 2.18; SD = 1.26) did not differ significantly in the intersubjective agreement of their abstinence-identified rules (t (51) = 1.83; p > .05). Similarly, parents (M = 2.25; SD = 1.16) and their children (M = 2.18; SD = 1.22) did not differ significantly in the intersubjective agreement of their contingency-identified rules (t (77) = .66; p > .05). For the alcohol health domain, parents (M = 2.42; SD = 1.68) and their children (M = 2.12; SD = 1.36) differed in the intersubjective agreement of their abstinence rules but at the .012 level only (t (132) = 3.11). Parents (M = 2.18; SD = 1.37) and their children (M = 2.21; SD = 1.37) did not differ significantly in the intersubjective agreement of their contingency rules (t (57) = .24; p > .05). For the tobacco health domain, parents (M = 3.06; SD = .87) and their children (M = 2.95; SD = .94) did not differ significantly in the intersubjective agreement of the abstinence rules (t (149) = 1.94; p > .05). Similarly, parents (M = 2.05; SD = 1.28) and their children (M = 1.93; SD = 1.29) did not differ significantly in the intersubjective agreement of their contingency rules (t (9) = 1.00; p > .05).

²Because of page limitations, we have not included the correlation matrix in this article. It is available from the lead author upon request.

³To be conservative, we additionally conducted a series of nonparametric statistical tests using the Wilcoxon Signed Ranks Test, for which the assumptions of parametric tests are suspended, using an adjusted alpha level; results of the parametric and nonparametric tests were, in general, similar.