Youth’s Bidirectional Socialization of Importance Beliefs by Parents

Drawing from Eccles’s Expectancy-Value Theory, the three studies in this dissertation adopted within-person cross-lagged panel models to examine youth’s bidirectional importance belief socialization by parents in math, sports and music. Using data from the Michigan Study of Adolescent and Adult Life Transitions as well as the Childhood and Beyond dataset, including youth and their parents from 1st to 7th grade, we had two sets of major findings. First, we found that parents influenced youth’s importance beliefs in all domains; however, youth only influenced their parents’ importance beliefs in leisure domains (i.e., sports and music). Second, in both math and sports, youth’s internalization of their parents’ values were interfered with or even hijacked by projection. We compared those results with prior research and discussed their theoretical relevance