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Chinese Adolescents’ Decision-Making, Parent-Adolescent Communication And Relationships, Yan Ruth Xia, Xiaolin Xie, Zhi Zhou, John Defrain, William H. Meredith, Raedene Combs

Department of Child, Youth, and Family Studies: Faculty Publications

The present study described Mainland Chinese adolescents’ decision-making, and examined the relationship among their decision-making involvement, parent-adolescent communication and relationship variables by using Structural Equation Modeling. Results demonstrated that Chinese parents appeared to be less authoritarian than the prevailing literature had described. Chinese adolescents experienced a passage of autonomy development similar to that of their American counterparts. Good parent-adolescent communication was positively associated with cohesion and negatively associated with conflict. It also mediated the relationship between adolescent age and parent-adolescent conflict. The relationships between parent-adolescent communication and cohesion as well as the relationship between adolescents’ age and decision involvement were …