Autonomy and Relatedness in Mother-Adolescent Interactions: An Investigation Using Exploratory Graph Analysis

Mother-adolescent interactions are important contexts for teens to develop essential autonomy and relatedness skills. The Autonomy and Relatedness Coding System was designed to measure these behaviors and is based on four a priori theoretical categories, including behaviors promoting autonomy, behaviors undermining autonomy, behaviors promoting relatedness, and behaviors undermining relatedness. The current study used Exploratory Graph Analysis (EGA) to examine the underlying dimensional structure of autonomy and relatedness behaviors in mother-adolescent interactions and compare this structure to the theoretical categories. Participants were 184 mother-adolescent dyads participating in a larger longitudinal study of adolescent social development. Mothers and adolescents (M_age = 13.35, SD = 0.64) discussed an area of disagreement. These interactions were coded for nine different autonomy and relatedness behaviors displayed by mothers and adolescents. EGA results revealed a three-dimensional structure for both adolescents' behaviors toward mothers and mothers' behaviors toward adolescents. These three-dimensional models fit the data significantly better than the theoretical four-dimensional model. Bootstrap EGA results further replicated the three-dimensional structure. These findings suggest that EGA is a useful tool for examining the dimensional structure of autonomy and relatedness behaviors in mother-adolescent interactions and provide more nuanced insights into the developmental differences of these behaviors in mothers versus teens.