Effects of Family Conflict on Adolescent Adjustment: Testing the Effectiveness of an Intervention Targeting Family Communication

The negative effects of conflict within the home on child and adolescent adjustment have been well established. Employing a holistic, multi-method, process-oriented approach of the relationships within the family, this thesis first attempted to identify the relation between family and marital conflict and adolescent adjustment, and by what means this process occurs. Family conflict was directly related to both internalizing and externalizing symptoms, and indirectly related to internalizing symptoms through the adolescent’s insecurity about the family and marital relationships. The second aim of this project was to test the effectiveness of a communication-focused intervention, assessing whether or not the addition of the adolescent in treatment components led to more positive outcomes in families. The intervention was effective at increasing constructive conflict behaviors, decreasing destructive conflict behaviors, and increasing the degree of resolution families reached in an in-lab problem-solving task; however, no differences were found between treatment conditions.