Iowa State University

Rand Conger

Click here to view Dr. Conger's Curriculum Vitae (CV)

Rand Conger's research has focused primarily on large, community-based studies of families, children and adolescents. He has been concerned with how social and economic factors influence family interaction processes and how these processes, in turn, affect the emotional and behavioral functioning of family members. In addition, his work considers how experiences during childhood and adolescence shape an individual's competencies as a parent and romantic partner when they become an adult. In one smaller study, he also has examined how genetic history influences the family environment and adolescent development. Significant findings from this program of research can be related to three major themes involving family economic stress, family interaction processes and individual development, and emergent family systems.

Family economic stress.

Since 1988, Conger has been involved with four major studies that have examined the influence of economic stress on families, children, and adolescents: the Iowa Youth and Families Project, the Iowa Single Parent Project, the Family Transitions Project and the Family and Community Health Study. These community studies have involved almost 1,500 families and over 4,000 individual family members. They have included participants in urban and rural areas and both African-American and European American families. Families have varied in terms of socioeconomic status, from extremely poor to quite wealthy, and in terms of family structure including single-parent households, stepfamilies, two biological parent families, and other family forms. Extensive information has been collected on all of these families over time and includes reports by family members, videotaped discussions in the home, and data from schools and other community agencies. For all of these different types of families, economic stress appears to have a harmful effect on parents and children through a series of specific socioeconomic, emotional, and behavioral mechanisms.

The means by which economic stress affects families and children has been captured by what Conger and his colleagues call the "Family Stress Model" of economic hardship. Consistent with the model, the findings from this research demonstrate that economic hardship, such as low income and income loss, increase parents' sadness, pessimism about the future, anger, despair and withdrawal from other family members. Economic stress has this impact on parents' social-emotional functioning through the daily pressures it creates for them, such as being unable to pay bills or acquire basic necessities such as adequate food, housing, clothing and medical care. As parents become more emotionally distressed, they tend to interact with one another and their children in a more irritable and less supportive fashion. These patterns of behavior increase instability in the marriage and also disrupt effective parenting practices, such as monitoring children's activities and using consistent and appropriate disciplinary strategies. Marital instability and disrupted parenting, in turn, increase children's risk of suffering developmental problems, such as depressed mood, substance abuse, and engaging in delinquent behaviors. These economic stress processes also decrease children's ability to function in a competent manner in school and with peers.

The findings also show, however, that parents who remain supportive of one another and who demonstrate effective problem solving skills under hardship conditions can disrupt this negative process and shield their children and themselves from these adverse consequences of economic stress. These parenting skills can be taught and used by human service professionals to assist families experiencing economic pressure or similar stresses in their lives. These detailed findings regarding how economic problems affect families provide several points of possible intervention that can reduce the negative effects of economic hardships while stressed families work to improve their economic situations. An especially important message from these findings is that the prevention of the negative consequences of economic stress for families and children requires two forms of action. The first form of intervention involves support for social policies that adequately aid families during stressful times as they recover from downturns in the economy. The second mode of prevention involves educating parents about effective strategies for managing the economic, emotional and family relationship challenges they will face when hardship occurs.

Family processes and individual development.

Researchers studying families have long assumed that parents affect the development of their children. More recently, however, investigators have asked whether children shape the behaviors of their parents. The longitudinal research by Conger and his colleagues has demonstrated that both processes occur; that is, parents and children mutually influence one another's actions in some very important ways. For example, results of this research demonstrate that, across the years of adolescence, the warmth and supportiveness of the parent toward the child leads to similar behaviors by the child toward the parent and vice versa. Similarly, parents and children who engage in high levels of hostility and coercion toward one another during early adolescence prompt these same behaviors toward one over time. This research suggests that while parents influence the development of children, children also influence the development of parents. This understanding leads to different approaches to helping families function as best they can. For example, traditional parent education programs typically focus only on training parents in more effective child rearing skills. Conger's results indicate that such programs could enhance the benefits they generate by training children to interact more effectively with their parents, a strategy that Dr. Virginia Molgaard has pursued in creating a new generation of parenting programs at the institute.

The process of mutual influence between parents and children discovered in this research has fundamental importance in understanding child and adolescent development. The findings suggest that children's problem behaviors actually reduce effective parenting practices, which leads to increased risk for problem behaviors such as emotional distress, substance use, delinquency, school failure or peer rejection. Children's pro-social behaviors to parents, on the other hand, increase effective-parenting practices that promote children's social and academic competence.

In Conger's research, effective parenting has been identified by a cluster of parenting behaviors, which he calls nurturant-involved parenting, that includes high warmth and support, low hostility, and appropriate monitoring and discipline. Other results from his research demonstrate that nurturant-involved parenting reduces risk for child behavioral problems and promotes the academic and social success of the child. These parenting behaviors also buffer children from stresses in their lives, such as economic problems, exposure to deviant peers, and the social stresses created by the transition from childhood to adolescence. The findings suggest that there are two keys to the creation of successful family programs aimed at promoting optimal child development. Such programs should (1) foster nurturant-involved parenting practices and (2) teach parents to engage in such behaviors despite the problem behaviors of their children, which may lead parents to want to withdraw or respond in an angry fashion.

Emergent family systems.

A central question related to families concerns how they turn out the way they do. Daily news stories chronicle family problems like divorce and child maltreatment, and media pundits continually ask the experts why these problems occur. Equally important, we wonder about how people come to be successful parents and spouses. Why do some people do such a good job in their roles as family members? Despite a great deal of guesswork by scholars and clinicians, we have not had good scientific information for answering these questions. We can ask adult parents and spouses about how they were raised and how their parents got along, but we know that what people tell us about the past usually reflects what is happening in their lives today as much or even more than actual past experiences. For example, an abusive parent may report that they were mistreated but this report may reflect the way they are behaving toward their child today more than how their parents treated them as a child.

Conger's research is beginning to provide the data needed to answer these important questions about the emergence of new families. For the past decade he has been following over 500 Iowa adolescents since they were either in the seventh or ninth grade. Each year these adolescents and members of their families have been interviewed in order to collect data on family experiences that might predict the competencies of these adolescents as parents and spouses when they reach adulthood. This prospective, longitudinal information avoids the problems of retrospective recall just discussed and allows the researchers to relate parenting practices and marital interactions actually observed five to ten years ago in the families of origin to the adolescents' experiences as spouses and parents during early adulthood. The original adolescents, who averaged 12-13 years of age when they began the study, now average 32 years of age. So what have we learned so far?

First, Conger and his colleagues have discovered that nurturant-involved parenting during early adolescence predicts behaviors toward a romantic partner as a young adult that are warm, supportive, and low in hostility. These behaviors promote marital and other romantic ties that are viewed by both partners as happy, satisfying and likely to endure. And contrary to the belief that adolescents learn how to behave in romantic relationships by observing how their parents treat one another, the quality of the parents' marital relationship had no direct influence on the young adult romantic relationship once parenting behaviors were taken into account. Apparently, it is the quality of parenting and not the observation of adult romantic relations that socializes a young person to engage in behaviors likely to promote successful and lasting romantic unions as an adult. Just as nurturant-involved parenting promotes success as an adolescent then, it also appears to promote success in romantic relations as an adult.

Second, early findings from this research indicate that the source of harsh and hostile parenting appears to be the type of parenting the young adult received as an adolescent. That is, when the parents of the target youth in the study were harsh, angry and irritable toward their children, then the target youth tends to behave in same way toward his or her young child when he or she becomes a parent. In addition, this intergenerational transmission of harsh parenting was associated with increased risk for problem behaviors by the young child. This scenario is consistent with conventional wisdom and provides the first solid evidence that this wisdom may be correct. In future research with these study participants, Conger and his colleagues will attempt to identify factors that make early adults resilient to adverse family of origin conditions. For example, how do some young adults manage to establish stable and satisfying marriages even if their parents were not nurturant and involved with them? How do some young adults become nurturant parents even though their parents treated them in an angry and hostile fashion? These questions need to be answered if we are to prevent the continuing cycle of problem families in one generation planting the seeds for problem families in the next generation.

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