4 - (IOP 23) The Relationship Between Dyadic Reports of Familial Interpersonal Functioning and Adolescent Suicidal Thinking

Preventing and reducing adolescent suicidal thoughts and behaviors (STBs) are critical public health goals. Perceived social support is a protective factor against (STBs) across the lifetime. For adolescents, perceived support from parents and perceived family relationship strength (FRS) may be particularly important for buffering against depressive symptoms and STBs. However, little literature has examined how parent reports of FRS and their own support of their children may predict risk for STBs. By collecting and analyzing concurrent reports from both adolescents and caregivers, this explores how mismatches between parent and adolescent perceptions of support and FRS may contribute to risk for sadness and suicidal ideation (SI).

Data are drawn from an ongoing EMA study of adolescents at elevated risk for suicide and their parents. The sample includes 943 days of data collected from 65 parent-child dyads. At multiple timepoints each day, adolescents were asked to report their perceptions of support received from their parents and FRS using the PROMIS Pediatric Family Relationships Scale (Bevans et al., 2017). Adolescents were also asked about their in-the-moment feelings across a range of affect states (e.g., sadness) and their current degree of passive and active SI. Parents received daily surveys assessing their perceptions of the support they provided their child and overall FRS using the same PROMIS scale.
Response Surface Analysis (RSA; Edwards & Parry, 1993), which characterizes the extent to which the combination of two predictor variables relate to one outcome variable, was used to estimate the effects of concordance and discordance between parent and child reports on the two predictors as well as the direction of any discordance.
We found that sadness was significantly higher on days when adolescents reported low perceived parental support and FRS but was not significantly associated with parent reports. However, both active and passive adolescent SI were significantly higher on days when parents reported low support and FRS but were not significantly associated with child reports. This indicates that data on parents’ perceptions of interpersonal functioning within the family may be particularly helpful to predict days when adolescents are at elevated risk.
When examining concordance, sadness and SI were higher on days when parents and children both report low levels of parental support and FRS. However, days with agreement on relatively high levels of support and FRS were not associated with decreased levels of sadness or SI, suggesting that these constructs (specifically when low) may be acting as risk factors rather than providing a protective effect.
By exploring relationships between parent and child daily reports of social support and FRS and adolescent sadness and SI, this project may illuminate opportunities to intervene not only with adolescents, but with parents who are poised to be particularly important protective factors during a high-risk period. Additionally, this is one of the first papers in clinical psychology to use multilevel RSA, which represents an important step in utilizing analytic approaches that account for and take advantage of the inherent complexity and richness of dyadic EMA data.