Techno-interference as an inverse proximal process: Within-person pathways from parental phubbing to cyber deviance...

Drawing on the Inverse Proximal Processes framework, the present study examined whether parental phubbing, a contemporary form of techno-interference, was followed by within-person increases in adolescent loneliness and, subsequently, cyber deviance, and whether developmental stage moderated specific paths in this sequence. A three-wave panel study spanning 12 months was conducted with 1051 Chinese adolescents (535 boys, 516 girls; M_age = 15.22 years) from a K-12 school in Henan Province, China. A random-intercept cross-lagged panel model isolated within-person dynamics from stable between-person differences, and indirect effects were evaluated with Monte Carlo confidence intervals. Four findings emerged. First, within-person increases in parental phubbing predicted subsequent increases in loneliness, which in turn predicted cyber deviance; direct effects were nonsignificant, consistent with full within-person mediation. Second, the loneliness-to-cyber-deviance path strengthened across measurement intervals. Third, the developmental-stage hypothesis received partial support: The omnibus multigroup test was nonsignificant, and moderation was confined to the loneliness-to-cyber-deviance path, which was significant in both intervals among early adolescents but only in the second interval among late adolescents. Fourth, robustness analyses indicated that these within-person associations were not attributable to reference-frame mismatch. The findings extend the Inverse Proximal Processes framework to techno-interference and inform developmentally tailored family- and school-based approaches to adolescent online risk behavior.