Two Views of One Relationship: Comparing Parents' and Young Adult Children's Reports of the Quality of Intergenerational Relations

Patterns of agreement and disagreement on the quality of intergenerational relationships were explored in a sample of parents and young adult children. Data on parent-child closeness, contact, control, and conflict were taken from parent and child interviews in the longitudinal National Survey of Families and Households. Parents gave more positive reports than their adult child on six of the eight relationship indicators where parent and child answered identical questions. Parents were especially likely to report higher levels of closeness. Three patterns of dyadic agreement were identified: high agreement (54%), parent more positive than child (25%), and child more positive than parent (21%). Despite these differences in perspective, regression models predicting intergenerational closeness and conflict were nearly invariant across the parent and child data. Key Words: intergenerational relations, measurement validity, multiple informants. The choice of informant for data collection has become an increasingly critical issue in research on intergenerational relationships. There have been relatively few studies of systematic differences in the perspectives of family members and the factors that affect the level of agreement in self-report studies (Tein, Roosa, Bengtson for parents, the investment pays off in maximizing continuity (Acock & Bengtson, p. 512). Young adult children may have little motivation to put a positive spin on relationships with parents. …