Investigating the Relationships Between Family Socialization and Adolescent Outcomes in Chinese Parent-Child Dyads

From the family system approach, families are collections of individuals organized into an integrative system, in which choices and behaviors of members are interdependent and mutually reinforced. However, the fact that prior family studies, especially in Chinese context, derived their findings from a single party may cause problems of method variance and response biases. Against this background, the current study adopted the actor-partner interdependence model approach (APIM) to investigate respective effects of family socialization in the form of parenting and family processes on child outcomes in terms of internalizing and externalizing symptoms concurrently from a sample of Chinese parent-child dyads. Results generally supported effects of family socialization on child outcomes, but varying in magnitudes depending on an actor effect or a partner one to be counted, and which family socialization factor being emphasized, as well as the internalizing or the externalizing symptoms as the outcome, all of which were verified by tests of critical ratio differences and model comparisons for parameters invariance. Implications, future research directions and limitations of the study are briefly discussed.