1. Objectifs

Intentions :
«The present study aimed to identify subgroups of adolescents who follow distinct developmental trajectories of warmth and conflict within the mother–adolescent and the father–adolescents relationships and to test whether the odds of following a specific trajectory vary depending on adolescents’ sex or genetic predisposition to depressive symptoms.» (p. 1754)

2. Méthode

Échantillon/Matériau :
«The present study utilized a genetically informative design based on a sample of 375 monozygotic (MZ) and 290 dizygotic (DZ) twins from same-sex twin pairs (i.e., a total of 665 individuals; 50.2% girls) assessed in Grade 7 […], Grade 8 […], Grade 9 […], and in Grade 11 [...]. They were part of a population-based sample of 467 MZ and same-sex dizygotic DZ twin pairs from the greater Montreal area, who were recruited at birth between November 1995 and July 1998.» (p. 1747)

Instruments :
Questionnaire

Type de traitement des données :
Analyse statistique

3. Résumé

The author’s «findings further indicate that adolescents’ depression symptoms may affect girls’ and boys’ relationship with their parents in the same way. This lack of sex moderation concords with studies reporting a similar (concurrent) link between the parent-adolescent relationship quality and depressive symptoms for boys and girls […]. Moreover, although the bivariate correlations suggested that girls experienced higher level of conflicts with both parents than boys throughout adolescence, these sex differences disappeared when genetic risk for depressive symptoms and actual depressive behavior were included as predictors of the parent-child conflict trajectories. The initially observed sex differences in parent-adolescent relationship quality thus seemed to be, for the most part, explained by sex differences in depressive symptoms during adolescence. Indeed, adolescent girls also reported significantly higher levels of depression symptoms than boys in the present study.» (p. 1755)