Topic Variation in Levels of Agreement Between Parents and Adolescents

The object of this paper is to examine why agreement between parents and adolescents varies across topics in the way it does and why discrepancies take the particular form they do. Data from a large-scale survey of adolescents matched with independent reports from their parents (N=3,988) have been used to show that the level of dyadic agreement is influenced by the objectivity of the topic, its relation to social norms, and its salience to the respondents. Agreement is high when the topic is objective and unambiguous, and when it does not activate problems of social desirability or personal threat. Topics which refer to recent events produce slightly less agreement than less timebound topics when the topic is a potentially threatening one. The level of agreement does not change if the referent is changed from the parent, to the student, or to those outside the dyad. Dorothy Jones Jessop is a sociologist and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Pediatrics, Albert Einstein College of Medicine. The research reported in this paper was carried out while the author was affiliated with the school of Public Health of Columbia University. The research was supported by grants from the National Institute on Drug Abuse: DA-000-64, "Family Processes in Adolescent Drug Use," Denise B. Kandel, Principal Investigator; and #5-PO1-DA-01097 to the Center for Socio-Cultural Research on Drug Use, Columbia University. The author wishes to thank Denise Kandel for the use of these data and for her general help and support; Herbert Menzel and Caroline Persell, for their help on this paper and throughout the larger work of which this was a part; the friends and colleagues whose comments have been most helpful; and Mirna deJesus for typing assistance. Any inadequacies are the responsibility of the author. Public Opinion Quarterly Vol. 46:538-559 ?) 1982 by the Trustees of Columbia University Published by Elsevier Science Publishing Co., Inc. 0033-362X/82/0046-538/$2.50 This content downloaded from 207.46.13.59 on Mon, 13 Jun 2016 06:14:48 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms AGREEMENT BETWEEN PARENTS AND ADOLESCENTS 539 plain why intradyadic agreement varies across topics in the way it does and why discrepancies take the particular form they do. Methodologically, it is important to know areas in which the report of one family member can be used as a surrogate for the report of another family member without affecting the relationships among variables. Substantively, agreement in the description (and, presumably, perception) of behaviors and attitudes is important because the child's adoption of a parental attitude or behavior may depend in part upon whether the child correctly perceives the parental position (Furstenberg, 1967; Kandel, 1974; Niemi, 1968; Tedin, 1974).1 Agreement can vary with the psychological traits of the individuals in the dyad or the quality of the relationship, but mainly these are relevant through the way they relate to the substantive topic on which dyad members report (Jessop, 1979). Variations in agreement and disagreement with the nature of the topic have been suggested previously by the work on: (1) group dynamics, with its distinction between perceptual agreement on objective reality and perceptual agreement in situations in which no such criterion exists (Brown, 1965); (2) interobserver reliability of survey and clinical reports, with the distinction between agreement on "hard" and "soft," objective and subjective, and behavioral and attitudinal data (Ballweg, 1968; Singer, 1973; Sudman and Bradburn, 1974; Mechanic, 1978); (3) disparate surveys of parents and children, most of which individually looked at only a single or a few related topics at a time (e.g., Furstenberg, 1967; Kandel and Lesser, 1968; Larson, 1974; Mason et al., 1976; Niemi, 1974; Oliver, 1977; Rossiter and Robertson, 1975; St. John, 1979; Tedin, 1974) and which collectively reveal wide intertopic variation in levels of agreement. The survey literature concludes that dyadic agreement is lower on less objective topics, threatening topics activating social desirability biases and problems of self-presentation, and topics removed in time or importance from respondents' experience (Sudman and Bradburn, 1974; Cannell, Oksenberg, and Converse, 1977). The group dynamics literature, on the other hand, suggests that agreement between subjects is higher when there is no objective standard (Tedeschi and Lindskold, 1976:551-52), and the attribution literature suggests that an observer is better able to grasp and report on a situation than an actor oriented to the cues necessary for further action (Jones and I This paper examines whether the survey reports of matched dyads of parents and adolescents agree in their descriptions of certain behaviors, attitudes, family interactions and relationships, and sociodemographic characteristics within their families. Other analyses of the same data focus on the question of intergenerational influence within the dyads (Kandel, 1974). This content downloaded from 207.46.13.59 on Mon, 13 Jun 2016 06:14:48 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 540 DOROTHY JONES JESSOP Nisbett, 1971). All bodies of literature seem to agree that personal history and internal states are known best by the actor. Based on these findings the present hypotheses are as follows: 1. Items which are objective and unambiguous to both dyad members will produce high agreement. Objective material is that on which, in principle, it is possible to collect an account from another person as verification. A topic is unambiguous if the categories used to define it are clearcut and well-defined, and do not require a high degree of inference on the part of the one reporting (Frick and Semmel, 1978). 2. Items which are nonproblematic normatively for both dyad members will produce high agreement. The essence of social desirability is that one response category is distinctly more socially approved than the other option(s). Sometimes the difference in the normative valuation is negligible, while in others it is large; in some cases none of the categories are clearly illegal, while in others a category involves clearly illicit behavior. The relevance of the topic to social norms indicates whether possession of a trait is positively sanctioned, negatively sanctioned, or of no interest normatively, i.e., the degree to which a deviance/conventionality dimension is involved at all. A related aspect is the degree of sociocultural conflict over the items. A topic not the subject of conflict may be more ambiguous because it is not questioned or examined. The hypothesis is that in the present data normatively problematic topics with one or more socially desirable responses and controversial topics will produce lower levels of dyadic agreement than topics which do not have this social desirability component and are noncontroversial. 3. Salience interacts with the relation of a topic to social norms (Sudman and Bradburn, 1974:53-54). For topics which are not normatively problematic, highly salient items will produce greater agreement than items with low salience. For topics which are normatively problematic, highly salient items will exhibit less dyadic agreement than will low salience items because of the personal threat involved. 4. The referent of the topic also will interact with the relation of the topic to social norms in such a way that personally threatening items (recent and involving dyad members) will produce less agreement than nonthreatening items. A second intent of this paper is to examine why, in the absence of dyadic agreement, discrepancies take the particular form they do. It is hypothesized that low levels of agreement will be associated with disagreements systematically skewed according to the personal characteristics of those reporting and the characteristics of their relationship (i.e., ambiguity and lack of objectivity, problematic relation to social norms). This content downloaded from 207.46.13.59 on Mon, 13 Jun 2016 06:14:48 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms AGREEMENT BETWEEN PARENTS AND ADOLESCENTS 541 In Table 1 the four theoretical dimensions are schematically presented and concrete items are categorized. Specifically, the hypothesis is that as sociodemographic characteristics are more objective and less ambiguous than behaviors, and behaviors more objective and less ambiguous than attitudes, the level of agreement will be greater on sociodemographic characteristics than on behaviors, and lowest on attitudes. Family interactions (behaviors) and relationships (more akin to attitudes) will overlap individual behaviors and attitudes, with reports of family interaction having levels of agreement similar to individual behaviors; and reports of family relationships having levels of agreement similar to individual attitudes. Correlatively, dyadic disagreements will be more systematically patterned for attitudes than for behaviors, and more for behaviors than for sociodemographic characteristics.