Research Seminar
How to Assess Synchronization in Family Members' Daily Life?Peter WilhelmUniversity of Fribourg, Switzerland | |
| Abstract: | How family members affect each other's feelings and behaviours is a crucial question in family and social psychology. To answer this question, ambulatory assessment techniques that capture family members' experiences and behaviours in their usual daily life over days or weeks are especially useful. To date various diary studies have been conducted to investigate transmission of affects in couples and in parent-child dyads. However, diary studies to investigate the synchronization of current affects in entire families are rare. The aim of our research was to investigate the extent to which family members' current moods synchronize in their usual daily life and how this synchronization can be explained. Using a computer-assisted diary approach, six times a day over the course of a week we asked 192 parents and 122 adolescent children from 96 Swiss families how they were feeling, where they were, with whom they were, and whether they had experienced conflicts with each other. To answer our research questions we propose a multilevel approach in which the similarity between family members' average mood (trait component) and the similarity between their current mood (state component) is reflected in the covariances of the random part of the model. Using this approach we were able to show that average mood was moderately correlated among family members. As expected, family members' current mood (state component) was more similar when they were together, than when they were apart. This indicates that family members' mood synchronizes when they come together. By extending the analyses we could explain the amount of synchronization by shared setting factors that have an impact on mood, such as location, activity, and time of the day. However, conflicts between the family members produced the largest decreases in the covariances and therefore seem to contribute most to the synchronization of current mood in family members' daily life. |
| Date: | Tue May 5, 12:15 pm - 1:15 pm |
| Place: | room 02.51 (Department of Psychology, Tiensestraat 102, 3000 Leuven) |