Longitudinal associations between authoritarian parenting and adolescent antisocial thinking, depression, and anxiety: Between- and within-person effects.

Abstract

Authoritarian parenting has been associated with adolescent internalizing problems and antisocial development, yet whether these associations involve stable between-person differences or within-person deviations in adolescent outcomes remains unclear. Using data from a four-wave longitudinal study with a US probability-based sample (N = 491; mean age = 15.28 years, SD = 1.29; 51.5% female; 48.7% non-Hispanic White, 23.2% Hispanic, 18.5% non-Hispanic Black, and 9.6% non-Hispanic Other). We estimated a random-intercept cross-lagged panel model (RI-CLPM) of adolescent outcomes across Waves 2-4, with authoritarian parenting assessed at Wave 1 as a time-invariant predictor. We tested whether the associations between authoritarian parenting and adolescent antisocial thinking, depression, and anxiety were evident at the between-person level, the within-person level, or both. Results revealed a theoretically meaningful pattern: authoritarian parenting was primarily associated with antisocial thinking at the between-person level, whereas associations with within-person deviations in anxiety and depression were detected only at Wave 4. Within-person cross-lagged associations among the three outcomes were not significant, while significant random intercept correlations suggested that their co-occurrence reflects shared stable trait-level vulnerabilities. Gender invariance was observed across all associations. These findings underscore the importance of disaggregating stable between-person differences from within-person outcome deviations in developmental research.