Abstract
We tested whether children show greater internalizing symptoms when their parents are actively abusing alcohol. In an integrative data analysis, we combined observations over ages 2 through 17 from two longitudinal studies of children of alcoholic parents and matched controls recruited from the community. Using a mixed modeling approach, we tested whether children showed elevated mother- and child-reported internalizing symptoms (a) at the same time that parents showed alcohol-related consequences (time-varying effects), (b) if parents showed greater alcohol-related consequences during the study period (proximal effects), and (c) if parents had a lifetime diagnosis of alcoholism that predated the study period (distal effects). No support for time-varying effects was found; proximal effects of mothers’ alcohol-related consequences on child-reported internalizing symptoms were found and distal effects of mother and father alcoholism predicted greater internalizing symptoms among children of alcoholic parents. Implications for the time-embedded relations between parent alcoholism and children’s internalizing symptoms are discussed.
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Notes
Although 3 year olds were targeted as the lower bound for study recruitment, because of assessment scheduling issues, six boys were assessed shortly before their 3-year birthday.
Because the sample contained very few African American participants, we were not able to look at effects separately for African American and Hispanic participants.
Differences in the assessment window for this instrument are part of the study effect which was tested in all aspects of analyses. As detailed later, results of testing in the IRT analyses, however, suggested no study differences in measurement structure after accounting for gender and age effects.
Because both imputation packages rely on Markov-Chain Monte-Carlo methods to draw samples from the posterior predictive distribution of the missing data given the observed data, we used graphical methods reviewed by Cowles and Carlin (1996) to assess whether the simulated “chains” had properly converged. We found that due to the relatively small proportion of missingness (i.e., the highest proportion of missing cases is 20.4% for the Father’s Depression diagnosis, and the fraction of missing information for this variable 20.1%.), the chains converged very fast, generally moving out of the initial phase and converging to the target (posterior) distribution in as few as 200 iterations. The low fraction of missing information in most variables ensured that with just M = 10 imputations, we achieved “relative efficiency” of at least 0.98 (see Rubin 1996).
Because indices of global model fit are not available within the mixed modeling framework, we judged fit by examining convergence among several indicators. We examined Akaike information criterion (AIC) and Bayesian information criterion (BIC) values (for these non-nested models reflecting linear, quadratic, and various piece-wise models) to determine functional form of the trajectories. (Actual AIC and BIC values available from first author by request.) Given that there are no formal thresholds for these model indices (rather model adequacy is based on relative comparisons across models) we used these indices more as guidelines than as absolute indices of fit. Our decision about model fit was based on a combination of these information-theory criteria tests, significance testing of the fixed and random effects (i.e., the linear, quadratic and piece-wise components), and visual inspection of graphs (e.g., plotting observed and model-implied means as a function of sample size).
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Acknowledgement
This work was supported by grant R01 DA15398 to AMH and R01 DA013148 to PJC. The work was also supported by grant R37 AA 07065 to RAZ and grant R01 AA16213 to LAC. This work was completed while AMH and PJC were visiting faculty at the Centre for Addictions Research in BC, University of Victoria, British Columbia. We thank the many individuals at the Centre and the University for their generous support of our work.
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Hussong, A.M., Cai, L., Curran, P.J. et al. Disaggregating the Distal, Proximal, and Time-Varying Effects of Parent Alcoholism on Children’s Internalizing Symptoms. J Abnorm Child Psychol 36, 335–346 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10802-007-9181-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10802-007-9181-9