Cultural, Family, and Personal Contexts of Parent-Adolescent Conflict

Abstract

Conflict between parents and their adolescents has been the subject of considerable research attention over the past several decades. Although much of this research has been criticized as atheoretical in design (Montemayor, 1983), there have been important theoretical implications drawn From its findings. Most significantly, the findings that only a minority of U.S. families experience serious levels of conflict have been instrumental in reframing conceptions of adolescence away from the earlier view of it as a period inevitably fraught with turmoil and stress (Blos, 1979; Freud, 1969). Parent-adolescent conflict remains an important area of inquiry because of the consistent associations between conflicted family interaction and several forms of internalized, externalized, and family problems (Montemayor, 1986). In investigating conflict between parents and adolescents, researchers have focused primarily on documenting the frequency of conflict, describing variations based on age and sex of parents and adolescents (e.g., Galambos & Almeida, 1992), and on developmental factors such as puberty, perceptions of social conventions, and expectancies of relationship with parents (Collins, 1990; Smetana, 1988; Smetana, Yau, Restrepo, & Braeges, 1991; Steinberg, 1981, 1988). This research has helped describe the normative developmental features of conflicted relationships between parents and adolescents, but has not attempted to explain variation in conflict between families. Why do some families have more conflict than others? What is it about a given set of parents and adolescents that results in more serious and sustained conflict? Since it has been demonstrated that families vary considerably in their degree of conflict, normative developmental factors are not sufficient in explaining variations across families. The reasons some families are more conflicted than others may have more to do with the personal characteristics of the participants in the conflict, or with other factors related to the life circumstances and interactional history of family members, than with normative changes occurring in either parents or adolescents. To this point, however, despite Montemayor's (1983, 1986) repeated admonitions, there appears to have been little investigation of the personal characteristics of family members or patterns of family interaction that are associated with variations in conflict during adolescence. This study represents an initial attempt to address this need. For the present research, parent-adolescent conflict was regressed on several categories of personal and contextual variables within each cultural group. These analyses focused primarily on family factors, such as family structure, social standing, and parenting patterns, and also included measures of parental and adolescent characteristics, such as personality, problem history, and depression. The purpose of these analyses was to begin to provide a personal and contextual profile of those individuals and families that experience higher levels of conflict. An important aspect of the study was that the sample included representative subsamples of white, black, and Hispanic families. This permitted an evaluation of whether parent-adolescent conflict is similar across cultures, or whether and how conflict and its predictors vary in different cultural groups. LEVELS OF CONFLICT ACROSS CULTURES Since the preponderance of studies have concentrated on white families, there is little information available as to how culture-specific parent-adolescent conflict is. As well as being a product of developmental transitions occurring in both parents and adolescents, it is sensible to consider that intergenerational conflict may also be a reflection of more general interaction patterns that exist in the home. These patterns are, in turn, affected by culture-specific philosophies, values, and behaviors. Variations in ideologies and goals regarding childrearing in different ethnic groups, as well as resultant socialization strategies and family interaction patterns, have been the subject of considerable recent discussion (Garcia Coll, 1990; Hoffman, 1988; Levine, 1977; Ogbu, 1981). …