About this session

Thursday, 10:00 AM - 11:30 AM

Daily Social Processes for Adolescent Development: Leveraging Diverse Methodological Approaches in Daily Diary Design

Social processes, including interactions with family, friends, and broader social experiences, are critical for adolescent development. Considering dramatical changes in adolescent daily life, daily diary design offers an ecologically valid way to capture these daily encounters and variations. This symposium includes four daily diary studies examining diverse aspects of adolescent daily social processes with distinct methodological approaches. Study 1 focused on the family domain, examining daily fluctuations and levels of parenting behaviors among Canadian adolescents. By calculating lability as a dynamic index, findings revealed a reciprocal relationship between daily parenting dynamics and adolescent maladjustment outcomes. Study 2 focused on the friend domain, specifically addressing psychosocial stresses with friends in Chinese rural boarding students. By using multilevel structural equation modeling, findings indicated that loneliness, particularly with a best friend, significantly predicted adolescent dysregulated diurnal cortisol output. Study 3 examined both family and friend domains, focusing on the moderation role of social need on social interactions with family and friends in an ethnically diverse sample of U.S. adolescents. By using multilevel modeling, findings highlighted the significance of high-quality connection with both family and friends for adolescent daily affects and clarified the nuanced role of social time duration under different social scenarios. Study 4 broadens the scope to general social process, investigating the bidirectional dynamics between (in-person and virtual) social connection and adolescent well-being. By using vector autoregressive models, findings demonstrated the reciprocity between social connection and well-being on concurrent and lagged days, emphasizing the importance of consistent high-quality social connection for adolescent development.

Paper #1
Title	A Multi-Informant Investigation on Domain-General and Domain-Specific Associations Between Daily Parenting Lability and Adolescent Maladjustment
Presenting author	Dr. Dan Gao, University of Alberta, Canada

Paper #2
Title	Cortisol in Rural Chinese Adolescents: A Daily Investigation of Individual and Best Friend Psychosocial Stress
Presenting author	Jiaxuan Zhao, Michigan State University, United States

Paper #3
Title	Daily Connection with Family and Friends in Relation to Adolescent Affects: Moderating by Social Need
Presenting author	Yuan Zhang, Ph.D., Arizona State University, United States

Paper #4
Title	Reciprocity Between Adolescent Social Connection and Well-Being: Using Vector Autoregressive Modeling in Daily Diary Design
Presenting author	Mengya Xia, Arizona State University, United States

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Session chair
Mengya Xia, Arizona State University, United States

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