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

Vollständiger Abstract

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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.