F. Christy McFarland & Katherine C. Little University of Virginia Poster presented at the biennial meeting of the Society for Research on Adolescence, Baltimore, MD, March, The authors can be reached at the Department of Psychology, PO Box , 102 Gilmer Hall, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA or,

Acknowledgements NIMH for funding awarded to Joseph P. Allen, Principal Investigator for the conduct and write-up of this study. and Sy Miin Chow for her help with the technical aspects of running these analyses. For copies of this poster and other articles and reprints please go to:

Abstract This study examines relationships between observational assessments of teens’ relationships with mothers, fathers, and close friends and adolescent popularity in the 8 th and 9 th grades. Teen’s autonomy and relatedness behaviors observed in all three types of interactions were shown using structural equation modeling methods to be indicators of a teen autonomous and relatedness state respectively. These latent variables were further linked to adolescent popularity in grades 8 and 9 and to changes in adolescent popularity between these two grades. The influence of teen autonomy increases from grade 8 to grade 9, while the influence of teen relatedness does not significantly increase from grade 8 to grade 9.

Introduction Promoting Autonomy and Relatedness in interactions with parents has been linked to both increased social competence and better close friendships in adolescence (Allen et al., 1994). Teens who are more successful in peer groups are often those who display leadership qualities such as assertiveness (Bukowski et al., 1996). Thus popular teens might also be more likely to display higher levels of autonomy in peer relationships. Previous regression analyses of this data have shown that teens who promoted autonomy in interactions with their fathers became more popular from age 13 to age 14 (McFarland, Schmidt, & Kauffman, 2003). This poster seeks to expand on this finding by including teen’s interactions with mothers and close friends as well as looking at the changes in popularity by grade rather than by age.

Introduction (cont’d) Popularity is an important index of adolescents’ functioning in their broad peer culture – distinct from their functioning within specific friendships (Bukowski et al., 1996). Popularity in adolescence has been linked to both positive and negative adolescent outcomes. Popular adolescents are more likely to have close friends and more likely to be selected for positions of student leadership (Franzoi, Davis, & Vasquez-Suson, 1994) Popularity has also been linked to adolescent tobacco use (Alexander et al. 2001), and eating disorders (Lieberman, Gauvin, Bukowski, & White, 2001).

Method Participants Multi-method, multi-reporter data were collected from a sample of 180 adolescents, their mothers (n=156), fathers (n=78), and closest same sex friends (n=171). Adolescents were recruited through a public middle school in the Southeastern United States when they were originally in the 7 th or 8 th grade, n=97 and n=83 respectively, (mean age at time of first measurement = 13.4 [sd 0.65]; 51.6% male, 38% minority, mean family income $30,000-39,000/yr). Autonomy and Relatedness Coding System (ARCS). Teens’ promotion of their own autonomy and relatedness in interactions with their mothers and fathers were evaluated by applying the previously validated ARCS to eight minute mother-teen and father-teen discussions in a disagreement task (Allen et al., 1995). Teens’ promotion of their autonomy and relatedness in interactions with their best friends interactions were coded by applying an adapted form of the ARCS to a hypothetical disagreement task called the Mars task (Allen, Porter & McFarland, 2001).

Method (cont’d)  The scale for promotion of autonomy was based upon the use of confident and reasoned arguments during the discussion.  The promotion of relatedness scale captures the degree to which the speaker engages with, listens to, and validates the other person during the disagreement. Popularity Adolescent popularity was assessed using a limited nomination sociometric measure, following the procedure described in Coie, Dodge, & Coppotelli (1982). 420 adolescents (43% of the school) completed like ratings naming up to 10 people in their grade with whom they would most like to spend time on a Saturday night. These ratings were compiled by grade and z-scores for the like ratings were used to form the adolescents’ popularity scores. Structural Models were fit using Mplus (Muthen & Muthen, 2003). This software package was used to test these models inputting raw data and using maximum likelihood estimations for any missing data.

Results – Figure 1

Results (cont’d) The model depicted in Figure 1, Model A, shows the most parsimonious model for the data. Model B was also fit to the data where the parameter between Teen Relatedness and Like 9 was allowed to vary. This did not produce a significant reduction in  2 (see Table 1 at right). Model AModel B 2 df 5958   2 /  df --0.9/1

Conclusions This model demonstrates that teens’ promotion of their own autonomy in interactions with their mothers, fathers, and close friends does share some common variance that can be seen as evidence for an underlying teen autonomous state. Teens’ promotion of relatedness with mothers, fathers, and close friends follows a similar pattern. The unique components of teens’ promotion of autonomy with fathers and mothers are significantly correlated with the unique components of promotion of relatedness with fathers and mothers, respectively, indicating that a multitrait multimethod model may be a useful extension of this work. Teen autonomy becomes more influential from grade 8 to grade 9 while teen relatedness has the same relationship with popularity at grade 8 and grade 9. These results may indicate that in times of social transition (the transition from middle school to high school) that the ability to display promote one’s own autonomy in relationships is a more strongly related to changes in popularity than the ability to be engaged and validating in relationships.

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