Marital Disagreements and Behavior Problems in Youth with Autism Spectrum Disorder: Natural Unfolding of Associations from Day-to-Day

Background: From a Family Systems perspective, the functioning of youth with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is reciprocally connected to the functioning of other family members and family subsystems such as parents’ marital relationship.  Youth with ASD often present with a challenging profile of co-occurring behavior problems. These challenges may contribute to marital disagreements directly (i.e., youth with ASD is topic of disagreement) or indirectly (i.e., more prone to disagree about other topics).  In turn, parents’ marital disagreements have been shown to lead to increases in youth behavior problems in research on the general population. In this talk, we will discuss the importance of family context for youth with ASD by discussing the day-to-day associations between parents’ marital disagreements and the co-occurring behavior problems of youth with ASD at a within- and between-family level.

Objectives:  The aims of the present study were to use daily diary data from an ongoing longitudinal study to: 1) describe the marital disagreements of married couples who have a son or daughter with ASD; 2) examine between-family differences in marital disagreements based on family, parent, and youth variables; and 3) evaluate the same-day and previous-day (lagged) associations between marital disagreements and the severity of the youth with ASD’s co-occurring behavior problems.

Methods: Analyses included 96 families of youth (aged 10-20 yrs) with ASD. All youth had a documented diagnosis of ASD by an educational or medical specialist, which included the Autism Diagnostic and Observational Schedule. Parents had a mean age of 45.38 yrs (SD = 4.32) and median household income of $70 to $79K. Youth with ASD had an average age of 14.23 yrs (SD= 3.53) and most were male (74.9%).  Mothers and fathers independently completed a daily diary in which they reported on marital disagreements, including number, topic, and severity of negative emotions. Parents also independently completed the Scales of Independent Behavior–Revised (Bruininks et al., 1996) each day of the diary to assess the frequency x severity of the youth with ASD’s co-occurring behavior problems.

Results: Multilevel multivariate modeling using HLM was conducted to examine within-person same-day associations between the youth with ASD’s behavioral problems and marital disagreement variables within the 10-day daily diary.  The between-couple effects of family, parent, and child variables on initial status of marital disagreement variables and their interaction with within-person predictors were examined.  The youth with ASD’s co-occurring behavior problems significantly co-varied with the number of marital disagreements and the severity of negative emotions, but not topic. The previous-day (lagged models) suggested a bi-directional pattern of effects.

Conclusions: Findings offer insight into the spontaneous ‘real time’ day-to-day interdependency of marital disagreements and the co-occurring behavior problems of youth with ASD. The youth with ASD’s co-occurring behavior problems were related to between-family variability in marital disagreements as well as within-family day-to-day fluctuations in marital disagreements in bi-directional ways.  Implications for interventions and next steps in research will be discussed.

Bruininks, R H, Woodcock, R, Weatherman, R, Hill, B. (1996). Scales of Independent Behavior-Revised. Chicago, IL: Riverside