About this session

Saturday, 2:00 PM - 3:30 PM

Advanced Methods for Examining Innovative Questions in Sibling Research

Siblings are present in 78% of U.S. families (Knop, 2020) and the longest lasting relationships most individuals experience, although they remain understudied in developmental science (Holmes et al., 2024). The dyadic and evolving nature of these relationships and their critical influence on youth’s development and adjustment underscore the importance of research on siblings. In this symposium a diverse set of papers illustrate how advanced methodological and statistical approaches can be applied to address novel questions about siblings. Specifically, four sibling-focused papers illustrate unique insights from person-centered analyses, daily and weekend diaries, and topic modeling. Applying latent profile analysis to study siblings as a dyadic relationship, the first paper identifies distinct sibling relationship profiles and investigates how variation across dyads is linked to interpersonal relationships outside the family among Mexican-origin adolescents. The second study examines day-to-day variation in technology-mediated communication between siblings using daily diary data from college-aged siblings and addresses methodological and analytical challenges of online daily diary data collection. The third study uses ecologically valid assessments of weekend diaries to examine predictors of siblings’ co-use of alcohol. The fourth study applies a natural language processing approach of Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic modeling to understand themes in sibling research. Collectively, these studies vary in their sample characteristics (e.g., race/ethnicity, developmental period) and contexts, including rural and urban/suburban settings. The research in this symposium highlights modern methodological and statistical approaches as applied to innovative questions to advance research on the role of siblings in development.

Paper #1
Title	Latent Profiles of Sibling Relationship Qualities Among Mexican-Origin
Presenting author	Yunyan Zhao, University of Notre Dame, United States

Paper #2
Title	“I don’t talk to my brother as much as I should”: Technology-mediated communication between siblings
Presenting author	Yue Guo, University of Missouri, United States

Paper #3
Title	What predicts adolescent siblings’ drinking alcohol together: A weekend diary approach
Presenting author	Weimiao Zhou, Utah State University, United States

Paper #4
Title	LDA Topic Modeling Approach to examine Topic Trends in Sibling Research
Presenting author	Karina Cahill, Arizona State University, United States

View all paper details

Session chair
Karina Cahill, Arizona State University, United States

⇦ Back to schedule