Is It Top-Down, Trickle-Up, or Reciprocal?: Testing Longitudinal Relationships between Youth News Use and Parent and Peer Political Discussion

Using data from a three-wave, parent-child panel survey and Slater's Reinforcing Spirals Model (RSM) as an analytical framework, three rival communication pathways to political socialization are tested: "top-down" from parents to kids, "trickle-up" from kids to parents, and "reciprocal." I ultimately document a trickle-up process whereby baseline levels of youth news use, and political discussion with peers predict future political discussion with parents. Implications for theorizing about communication processes that facilitate socialization and suggestions for modeling communication variables using parent-child dyadic data are discussed.