Identifying parent-sibling socialization profiles and their prospective associations with adolescents' interpersonal competence.

Abstract

Family socialization plays a key role in adolescents' social development, yet little is known about how adolescents are socialized across different family subsystems beyond parental socialization. By using latent profile analysis to capture a holistic view of co-occurring family dynamics, this study aimed to identify different emotion socialization patterns in parent-adolescent and sibling subsystems and their longitudinal associations with adolescent interpersonal competence. Participants were 175 families with at least two children (target adolescent M_age = 14.09, 47.4% female). At baseline (Time 1), caregivers reported emotion coaching and adolescents' sibling companionship and aggression; at 6-month follow-up (Time 2), adolescents reported interpersonal competence. Latent profile analysis was used to identify distinct profiles of family-level socialization at Time 1 and how adolescents' interpersonal competence differs across profiles at Time 2. A five-profile solution of parent-sibling socialization provided the best fit: low-support (4%), sibling-positive (29%), parent-positive (11%), overall-negative (29%), and overall-positive (27%). Significant differences emerged in all dimensions of interpersonal competence: Overall-positive adolescents reported higher scores of asserting influence, self-disclosure, and conflict resolution than all other profiles and higher scores of initializing relationships than those in all profiles except low-support. In addition, sibling-positive adolescents scored higher than overall-negative adolescents in providing emotional support and conflict resolution. Findings highlight the importance of concurrently considering multiple family subsystems, particularly the sibling subsystem, in socialization processes and their collective implications on adolescents' interpersonal competence. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).