Date of Award

10-2025

Document Type

Doctoral Research Project

Degree Name

Doctor of Psychology (PsyD)

Department

Psychology

First Advisor

Radhika Krishnamurthy

Second Advisor

Brian Fisak

Third Advisor

Jonathan K. Fernand

Fourth Advisor

Munevver Mine Subasi

Abstract

Adolescence is a critical developmental period that marks the transition between childhood and adulthood. Psychopathology is known to emerge during this time, in which many internalizing and externalizing disorders have their onset. The assessment of adolescent psychopathology involves use of questionnaire measures to obtain perspectives from the adolescent themselves, their parents, and their teachers. Parents have been found to be especially important informants of adolescent functioning. With new challenges that arise for present-day adolescents (e.g., social media use), parents can provide insight into the different areas that need to be evaluated when assessing domains of contemporary adolescents’ development and psychopathology. The current study surveyed parents or guardians of adolescents (N = 86) regarding areas of concern for today’s teenagers and important qualities for teenagers to have. The sample consisted of predominantly white, affluent, married women in the state of Florida. Frequency data were obtained to identify the most frequent items to which the participants agreed/strongly agreed or disagreed/strongly disagreed. Participants were also asked to select up to 10 items that they considered to be most troubling for adolescents and up to 3 qualities they considered important for adolescents to have. The concerns that were most frequently agreed to included spending excessive time on social media or video games and concerns related to teenagers’ emotional functioning and sense of self. This involved items such as being overly self-conscious, feeling lonely, becoming easily upset or stressed, and fearing criticism from others. Items involving feeling bad about themselves and not having a clear sense of who they are were frequently selected among the participants’ top 10 concerns. Participants most frequently disagreed with the importance of behavioral-related items such as stealing or destroying property. Among the 10 qualities provided to the participants, being polite and having self-control were most frequently agreed to as important qualities for adolescents to maintain. Being polite was also selected the most among their top three qualities, and being responsible was selected at the same frequency. Additionally, comparisons were conducted between parents of teenagers reported to have a mental health treatment history versus parents of teenagers without a mental health treatment history. A series of Mann-Whitney U tests identified five items to which the two groups of parents had significant differences in their responses, with significantly higher scores for parents of teenagers with mental health treatment histories. Chi-square analyses further identified statistically significant differences for three of the five items. These findings offer directions for content coverage in upcoming revisions of adolescent assessment measures such as the MMPI-A- RF.

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