A Socioemotional Network Perspective on Momentary Experiences of Family Conflict in Young Adults

Family conflict is a well-established predictor of well-being in youth. Traditional approaches focus on between-family differences in conflict. Daily fluctuations in conflict within families might also impact wellbeing, but more research is needed to understand how and why. Using 21 days of daily diary data and 6-times a day experience-sampling data (n=77 participants; mean age=21.18, SD=1.75; 63 women, 14 men), we captured day-to-day and within-day fluctuations in family conflict, anger, anxiety, and sadness. Using multilevel models, we find that days of higher than usual anger are also days of higher than usual family conflict. Examining associations between family conflict and emotions within days, we find that moments of higher than usual anger predict higher than usual family conflict later in the day. We observe substantial between-family heterogeneity in these patterns with implications for well-being; youth showing substantial interplay between family conflict and emotions across time had more perseverative family conflict and greater trait anxiety. Overall, findings indicate the importance of increases in youth anger for experiences of family conflict during young adulthood and demonstrate how intensive repeated measures coupled with network analytic approaches can capture long-theorized notions of circularly causal processes in daily family life.