Nancy Darling's lab

Psychology Department, Oberlin College

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last updated 3/8/08

Current Research Projects

My current research focuses on the course, predictors, and consequences of adolescents' social relationships. Most of research is done within the four projects described here. Of those projects, two - the Structure and Adolescent Leisure and the Ecological Context of Development - are complete. Analysis of the data is currently underway. Papers from those projects are available in other parts of this website.

Data collection for the Continuity of Close Relationships project is also complete and we are very busy coding! A description of this new project and grant is below. Several papers have come from this project that can be accessed through the Presentations link to the left.

In addition, we are working at exploring data from the CPU (Chile, Philippines, United States) Project. This project, which builds on and extends findings from SAL and ECD, is the culmination of the last 10 years of my research efforts. We completed pilot data collection in both the Philippines and Chile with approximately 400 students in Fall, 2000. Initial work looks extremely promising! After tweaking and adjusting our measures, we collected a second dataset in the Philippines, Chile, and Italy and from a predominantly Hispanic US sample in Miami, Florida. Several analyses from this project can be found in the Conference & Outreach section of this site and some of the published work from this study are listed in my vita and are available upon request. A related longitudinal project has been carried out in Chile, and includes data from over 1500 adolescents and approximately 800 of their parents.

CPU: Changing Conceptions of Parental Authority over Adolescence in Chile, the Philippines, and the United States: (with Doug Coatsworth, Patricio Cumsille, María Pennock-Roman, and Liane Peña-Alpenay). The extensive literature on parental monitoring focuses on the importance of parents' knowledge of their children's activities in preventing problem behavior, encouraging academic achievement, and limiting children's contact with antisocial peers (Dishion & McMahon, 1998). Although effective parental monitoring predicts positive outcomes during both childhood and adolescence, normative changes in friendship patterns and activities that accompany the onset of adolescence transform the nature of parental monitoring. As children become adolescents, they spend more time outside of the family, in the company of peers, and in settings away from the direct supervision of parents or other adults (Csikszentmihalyi & Larson, 1984). Because of these changes, parents must increasingly rely on adolescents themselves as the primary sources of information about their behavior away from home. Recent reinterpretations of the literature on parental monitoring (e.g. Kerr & Stattin, 2000; Stattin & Kerr, in press) and empirical examinations of the active role played by adolescents in facilitating monitoring (e.g. Darling, Cumsille, & Dowdy, 1998; Darling, Hames, & Cumsille, 2000) have underscored the importance of understanding what information adolescents choose to share with their parents and why. This is particularly important when parents and adolescents disagree. This cross-cultural study of 6th graders through college students focuses on the predictors and consequences of parental knowledge. In particular, we are interested in how cultural differences in adolescents' and parents' expectations of obedience and autonomy will contribute to differences or similarities in parent-adolescent conflict, parental knowledge of adolescent behavior, and adolescent disclosure strategies. Specifically, we will address:

1. What issues do adolescents recognize as within the legitimate domain of parental authority and how does this influence their decisions to share information with their parents?
2. What characteristics of parents and children facilitate greater disclosure and parental monitoring?
3. Does greater disclosure buffer adolescents from potentially negative effects of low parental monitoring on problem behavior?
4. What types of parent-adolescent relationships facilitate adolescent autonomy and self-expression within the context of leisure? Does this vary by social context?
5. What are the consequences of self-expression for adolescent well-being?

In addition to the initial three countries that were the focus of our interest, we have forged a new collaboration in Italy, which has allowed us to collect data in Milan, as well.

CCR: Continuity of Close Relationships: (with Catherine Cohan). Although romantic relationships have long been seen as central to understanding processes of adult emotion regulation, stress, and coping, we know little about how individual differences in early romantic relationships develop. Such neglect is surprising, given that emotions linked to romantic relationships make up a substantial part of adolescents' emotional lives and, to a great extent, explain the greater emotional volatility of adolescents compared to adults (Larson & Richards, 1994). The goals of this project are (a) to extend our understanding of the regulation and expression of negative emotion by examining the predictors of middle adolescents' competence in romantic relationships and (b) to predict individual differences in adolescents' psychological well-being as a function of romantic competence. This study focuses on adolescents during their junior and senior years in high school. We have just completed collecting data from more than 100 dating adolescents and their parents and friends. This research includes both survey and observational data. The goals, data collection strategy, and results of early analyses of our pilt research and our observational data is available n the Conference & Outreach section of this site.

This project has been funded by the NIMH and is described here. We have completed data collection and are currently in the process of coding.

SAL: Structure of Adolescent Leisure: (with Linda Caldwell).This project, now complete, is a cross-sectional study of 120 high school students focusing on the processes through which after-school ecologies are selected and how they affect psychological well-being, psychosocial development, academic competence, and involvement in antisocial behaviors. The project addresses questions in three major areas. First, what determines adolescents' decisions to share information with their parents about areas of disagreement. Second, to do what extent do adolescent characteristics such as boredom-proneness and active v. reactive leisure orientation predict the settings in which adolescents spend their after-school hours and the activities they become involved with in those settings? Third, to what extent do parents and peers buffer or potentiate potential risks of particular social settings?

ECD: Ecological Context of Development: (with Bonnie Dowdy). This is a longitudinal, multi-source study of adolescents from 7th-12th grade (now complete). It also contains a cross-sectional component including 300 6th, 7th, and 8th graders. Major focuses of the study including adolescents' decisions to share information with their parents, the determinants and consequences of parenting style, and adolescent dating relationship.