Using Bi-Weekly Surveys to Portray Adolescent Partnership Dynamics: Lessons From a Mobile Diary Study

Adolescents' Love Lives: Heterogeneity in Relationship Status Trajectories and Links with Affect

Romantic experiences are more fluid and heterogeneous during middle adolescence than at any other life stage, but current understanding of this heterogeneity and flux is limited because of imprecise measurement. A sample of 531 adolescents (55% female; 28% non-Hispanic White; 32% Black; 27% Hispanic; 14% Other) recruited from an ongoing birth cohort study (Mean age = 16.7 years, SD = 0.358), was administered bi-weekly diaries over 52 weeks to prospectively record transitions in and out of romantic and sexual relationships and to assess links with positive affect (frequency of happiness) and negative affect (frequency of sadness). Relationship statuses considered included not only dating, but also liminal and asymmetrical statuses such as talking/flirting and crushes. Latent profile analyses revealed six relationship status trajectories, or love life profiles, based on the number of intra-year partners and on the extent of involvement in each of the relationship statuses. Approximately half of teens either were in stable dating relationships or uninvolved romantically during the year; however, half experienced variable levels of flux in their love lives. Relationship instability, not romantic involvement per se, was associated with higher levels of sadness and lower levels of happiness. Snapshots of teen romantic involvement based on one or two points in time obscure the extent of relationship heterogeneity and flux and how relationship status trajectories are associated with positive and negative affect.

Adolescent Partnership Quality and Emotional Health: Insights from an Intensive Longitudinal Study

Prior research has documented an association between adolescents' romantic experiences and poor emotional health. However, lack of intensive longitudinal measurement and an emphasis on negative affect have limited understanding about the extent to which adolescent relationship quality influences the emotional health of adolescents in partnerships, including the potential benefits of high-quality partnerships. Previous research has also been limited in its ability to account for factors that select adolescents into lower or higher quality partnerships. Using biweekly intensive longitudinal data from the mDiary Study of Adolescent Relationships linked to six waves of birth cohort data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, this paper uses multilevel mixed-effects models to address three questions: (1) How are changes in partnership quality (defined as validation, frequency of disagreements, and global quality) associated with changes in both positive and negative affect; (2) Do observed associations persist net of factors that potentially select adolescents into lower or higher quality partnerships (e.g., childhood family experiences); and (3) Do associations between partnership quality and affect differ by gender? Results show that higher quality partnerships are associated with both decreases in negative affect and increases in positive affect. There were no significant gender differences on average. The study's findings highlight the importance of partnership quality as a key source of temporal variation in adolescents' emotional states.

Child development in real time: The power of ambulatory assessment for investigating dynamic developmental processes and behavior longitudinally

Ambulatory assessment methods used to capture "real-world" microprocesses through self-report or passive data collection are used to assess child and adolescent behavior in context. This chapter begins by introducing the researcher to ambulatory assessment methods and describes these methods for use in child and adolescent developmental and behavioral research. Next, the importance of attention to timing is discussed. We then suggest appropriate analytic methods for putting ambulatory assessment data to best use to answer developmental research questions. We end with comments on the ethics of ambulatory assessment data and some concluding remarks for researchers wanting to use these methods in their own work.

Adolescents' Partner Search in the Digital Age: Correlates and Characteristics of Relationships Initiated Online

Digital technology and social media platforms have transformed the ways adolescents communicate and cultivate romantic relationships, but few studies consider whether relationships initiated online are less salutary than those formed in person. A sample of 531 adolescents (Mean age = 16.7 years, SD = 0.358; 55% female) was recruited from an ongoing birth cohort study and administered bi-weekly diaries over a year to evaluate the circumstances associated with adolescents' romantic relationship formation and relationship quality. Two-thirds of respondents initiated one or more romantic relationships during the study, of which 15% were initiated online. Girls who did not fit in well at school and who had difficulty making friends were more likely to initiate romantic relationships online than their more sociable peers who fit in well at school; for boys, however, access to mobile devices increased the odds that romantic relationships were initiated online. The diaries captured considerable flux in the evolution of romantic relationships, but there was limited evidence that relationships initiated online involved greater risks, with the notable exception of greater age asymmetry.

Using Paradata to Evaluate Youth Participation in a Digital Diary Study

We analyze recruitment, access and longitudinal response paradata from a year-long intensive longitudinal study (mDiary) that used a mobile-optimized web app to administer 25 bi-weekly diaries to youth recruited from a birth cohort study. Analyses investigate which aspects of teen recruitment experiences are associated with enrollment and longitudinal response patterns; whether compliance behavior of teens who require multiple invitations to enroll differs from that of teens who enroll on the first invitation; and what personal and social circumstances are associated with different longitudinal compliance patterns. Latent Class Analysis (LCA) is used to derive longitudinal compliance classes. mDiary's person-survey response rate of 70 percent is noteworthy considering reports that response rates for smartphone studies trail those administered via telephone or personal computers. Conditional on agreeing to participate, teens with texting capability were over six times as likely to enroll as their peers lacking access, and they also completed 6-7 more diaries. Youth who required multiple prods to register not only were less likely to enroll than their peers who registered at the first invitation, but also tended to attrite early. Compared with teens who completed all 25 surveys, those who attrited early had less access to texting capability, home Internet service, and had low-education mothers. Consistent with studies of adults, nonparticipants were disproportionately black males from socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds.

Why Digital Tools Have Not Yet Revolutionized Adolescent Health Research and What We Can Do

The promise of digital tools and devices for spurring new discoveries in adolescence research is enticing. Notably, this special section draws attention to many of the advantages that mobile and wearable devices offer for ambulatory assessment research, which have now been realized. Despite such progress, digital tools have not yet delivered on their predicted revolution of adolescent health research. I offer four reasons for why digital devices have fallen short of this predicted promise. For each barrier, I suggest parallel strategies for ensuring adolescent research benefits from Ambulatory Assessment advances. To avoid being left behind, adolescence scholarship must develop in time with innovations in digital devices and platforms, which are moving forward to support basic science and interventions in mental health.

The Practicalities and Perils of Ambulatory Assessment's Promise: Introduction to a Special Section

Ambulatory assessment (AA) offers one of the most exciting approaches for opening the dynamic "black box" of adolescents' daily lives. In this introduction, we spotlight AA's surprisingly restricted market share within adolescent scholarship. We describe thorny challenges these intense methods can pose when conducting adolescent research "in situ" and underscore that capturing quality AA data means placing adolescents' developmental stage at the forefront. The novel research reported in this special section speaks to these challenges and underscores the promise of AA for conducting developmentally salient science. The nine articles included in the section span multiple disciplines (Sociology, Psychology, Public Health) and reflect diverse viewpoints, approaches, and theories. All provide multiple novel best-practice strategies for conducting AA scholarship with adolescents.