Guided cognitive reframing of adolescent-father conflict: Who Mexican American and European American adolescents seek and why

Conflict between adolescents and their parents is an important predictor of adolescent adjustment (Gonzales, Deardorff, Formoso, Barr, & Barrera, 2006), and seeking social support to cope with conflict is healthy for adolescents (Nomaguchi, 2008). However, little is known about the psychological experience that social support plays in the lives of adolescents and what explains whether adolescents seek different sources of support. The choice to seek out others for support, the information sources provide, and the emotional consequences of those interactions are important to adolescents as they attempt to understand conflict interactions in their lives. We term this process guided cognitive reframing. In this chapter, we first offer a behavioral-cognitive-affective conceptual model for guided cognitive reframing that links seeking out a source of support, engaging in cognitive reframing of the conflict, and the affective experiences that result from reframing. Next, we review the literature on the confidants that adolescents seek (and the relative advantage of seeking each source). Finally, because the majority of the extant research has focused on adolescents in European American families, we examine cultural context, family, and individual factors that explain who is sought out to discuss family conflict among a diverse sample of Mexican American and European American 7th graders.