The effects of motivational interviewing and discussion on father/adolescent religious value congruence

This study represents one of the first attempts at experimentally facilitated transmission of religious beliefs/values from fathers to their adolescent children by (i) giving fathers motivational feedback about their fathering style aimed at enhancing the father/adolescent relationship and (ii) providing structured, supervised discussion of religious beliefs. Sixty-two 12-19 year-old adolescents and their fathers were randomly assigned to either a treatment or control group. At intake, all father/adolescent dyads completed the Personal Fathering Profile (Canfield, 1992), the Parent/Adolescent Communication Scale (Barnes & Olson, 1982), and the Religious Beliefs Survey (adapted from Hoge & Petrillo, 1978b). Experimental fathers received feedback about their fathering style by way of a motivational interview. They also discussed with their adolescents their inaccurate predictions of each others' responses on the Religious Beliefs Survey. One month later all families completed the questionnaires again. Control group families received the experimental manipulation after the post-test. Multiple analyses of covariance were performed to ascertain the effects of treatment on follow-up adolescent religious beliefs and father/adolescent religious belief congruence with intake values as covariates. Fathers and adolescents were significantly correlated in their religious beliefs both at intake and follow-up. In general, follow-up congruence between fathers' and adolescents' religious beliefs was not significantly higher in the experimental group than in the control group, despite significantly more religious belief discussion in experimental families between intake and follow-up. There was a marginally significant follow-up difference between treatment and control groups in father/adolescent congruence in devotionalism, with experimental adolescents resembling their fathers more on devotionalism scores. On follow-up creedal assent scores, experimental group adolescents were significantly more congruent than control group adolescents with their perceptions of their fathers' creedal assent scores. There was also an interaction between treatment group and teen age on follow-up creedal assent and on follow-up father/adolescent creedal assent congruence. In general, late adolescents' in the experimental group were more traditional, and were more congruent with their fathers than control group late adolescents and experimental group early adolescents. In age-based model was proposed to integrate relevant findings in the literature. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)