Methods for the Analysis of Longitudinal Dyadic Data with an Application to Intergenerational Exchanges of Family Support

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Data on pairs of subjects (dyads) are commonly collected in social research. In family research, for example, there is interest in the extent of agreement in family members' perceptions of relationship quality or how the strength of parent-child relationships depends on characteristics of parents and children. In organisational research, cooperation between coworkers may depend on factors relating to their relative roles and company ethos. Dyadic data provide detailed information on interpersonal processes, but they are challenging to analyse because of their highly complex structure: they are often longitudinal because of interest in dependencies between individuals over time, dyads may be clustered into larger groups (e.g. in families or organisations), and variables of interest such as perceptions and attitudes may be measured by multiple indicators. The principal aim of the proposed research is to develop new methods for the analysis of longitudinal multivariate dyadic data.While these methods have a number of potential applications, this project focuses on one important case study: the analysis of exchanges of support between parents and their adult children, using data from the British Household Panel Study and Understanding Society (or UK Household Longitudinal Study, UKHLS). Substantive questions to be investigated include:- What characteristics are associated with giving and receiving support for respondent-parent and respondent-adult offspring dyads? To what extent is the giving and receipt of help persistent over time for a given dyad? And to what extent is the level of exchange associated with lifecycle events?- What is the level and nature of reciprocity of exchanges?- For respondents with non-coresident parents and adult offspring, are norms of reciprocity strained where there are competing demands on respondents' time and resources?- To what extent are financial transfers and 'in kind' transfers (i.e. spending time to help someone) complementary and to what extent do they appear to be substitutes? How does this depend on the socio-economic circumstances of the donor? We propose a general latent variable modelling framework for the analysis of exchanges between respondents and their parents and adult children over time. Our approach will extend existing research in three major ways. First, most previous research has studied exchanges at a cross-section or between two waves. We will use longitudinal data from five waves of BHPS/UKHLS, spanning a 16-year period, which permits examination of associations between exchanges of support and changes in donor and recipient circumstances over time. Second, it is common to analyse support given separately from support received, which precludes the study of reciprocity. We propose a joint model of bidirectional exchanges with support given and support received treated as a multivariate response, and covariances between responses measuring the extent of reciprocation between generations. Third, family support is measured by a set of binary indicators of different kinds of help. The widespread practice of taking the sum score across items implicitly assigns equal weight to each indicator. We will instead specify a latent variable model that relates the binary items to underlying variables representing overall helping behaviour. The model will be extended to include indicators of financial transfers between family members. Sensitivity of results to measurement error and non-random dropout will also be considered.Project outputs will include both methodological and more substantively-oriented articles to communicate the research to social scientists. R routines will be written to implement the proposed methods. Extensive online resources will also be produced, including detailed instructions of how to conduct analyses in R, discussion of modelling decisions, and interpretation of results.