Orienting to Practice with Parents and Adolescents in Dispute

Background and Purpose: Social workers often respond to complex and potentially challenging situations like parent-adolescent conflicts. Perceptions of adolescence as a time of harmful parent-adolescent conflicts rooted in storm and stress are widespread and known to contribute to youth and parent wellbeing despite not receiving empirical support. Cognitive shortcuts, or heuristics, are common in environments characterized by high levels of stress and can be adaptive in helping social workers process large amounts of information in a short time but have also been shown to produce predictable biases in judgment. Bringing together dual process and integrative complexity theories, we propose that heuristics may diminish the use of complexity if left unchecked. This study examined whether training social work students to see parent-adolescent conflicts as bilateral and co-constructed dual resistance positively influences the complexity with which they observe disputes. We also tested whether participants’ views towards conflicts differ depending on whether they receive training or not.

Methods: Twenty social work students (median age = 25.5) were recruited from universities across British Columbia, Canada (third year BSW (50%), fourth year BSW (30%), and foundation MSW (35%)) and randomly assigned into a training or no-training condition to complete a three-step interview. Training consisted of a video vignette of a parent-adolescent conflict that participants responded to at regular intervals. No-training participants observed a teaching-as-usual lecture. Both groups then observed a simulated parent-adolescent conflict and commented on the video at regular intervals. Participants’ comments were blind coded for integrative complexity and linguistic content in three areas: interpersonal conflict, negative tone, and categorical thinking. Independent samples t-tests were used to compare integrative complexity scores and linguistic content in the training and no-training conditions.

Results: As hypothesized, training condition participants scored higher in integrative complexity than no-training participants (p=.028). No-training participants used more words associated with interpersonal conflict (p=.018), negative tone (p=.049), and categorical thinking (p=.008).

Conclusions and Implications: Findings from this small-scale study suggest that training may contribute to the complexity with which future social workers approach parent-adolescent conflict. As this study represents a novel application of integrative complexity theory in social work education, future studies are needed to explore the factors associated with the engagement of Type 2 processing. Social work education for students interested in working with families with adolescents may benefit from empirically based parent-child relationship theory to assist in moving past heuristics like storm and stress. A more balanced perspective about both the potential risks and benefits associated with parent-adolescent disputes may help future social workers better support families navigate their differences together.