Parental Cognitions and Children's Wellbeing

Overview

The current study aims to address the research limitations in previous studies by adopting a longitudinal design to investigate the associations between parental cognitions (parental expectations, parental beliefs, and parental attributional styles) and adolescents' wellbeing, resilience, and coping strategies across an extended period. Two main research questions were posed: 1) What are the associations between parental cognition factors (parental attribution, parental expectations, and parental beliefs and adolescents' outcomes (wellbeing, resilience, and stress-coping)? 2) Which parental cognition factor has the highest probability in predicting the changes of adolescents' wellbeing, resilience, and coping strategies over time? To answer these research questions, bayesian regression analysis was used to identify the best fitting model of adolescents' wellbeing outcomes and to discern the risk and protective roles of parental cognition factors within the model. Bayesian regression approach also enables the assignment of probabilities to each parental cognition factor, quantifying their credibly in relation to adolescents' wellbeing outcomes.

93 parents who has an adolescent aged between 11 to 16 years old were recruited. Only 65 of them had their adolescents to agree to sign up. This result in a 65 dyads of parents and adolescents in total. Parents and adolescents completed the measures on Qualtrics online survey site, respectively. After completion, researcher contacted parents to arrange a zoom call/phone call with their adolescents to complete measures on wellbeing and perceived stress. Among 93 parents who signed up the research, only 65 of their adolescents managed to complete both the online questionnaire and the call with the researcher at baseline. Six months after baseline, only adolescents were asked to repeat the above procedures as the follow-up. 37 adolescents completed the follow-up procedure, which makes this study sample ended up with 37 dyads of parents and adolescents. The primary objective of this observational study is to determine which parental factor, among the three primary parental cognition schemas (parental expectations, parental beliefs, and parental attributional styles), exhibits consistent effects on predicting the changes of adolescents' wellbeing over time.