PREDICTING NORMATIVE AND PROBLEMATIC FAMILY PATHWAYS TO THE TRANSITION TO SIBLINGHOOD: COMMENTARY ON VOLLING ET AL.’S MONOGRAPH
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Volling et al.'s monograph provides a rich, thoughtful, and rigorous account of how the transition to siblinghood is experienced by the first-born child and the family. In their comprehensive longitudinal study, they followed 241 families from the prenatal period before the second-born's birth until this child was 12-months old. Siblings are a critical, but understudied, relationship in children's development; the challenges posed in researching sibling dynamics in the context of the family are discussed. Prior psychodynamic and developmental research literature is critiqued, which places the current study into perspective and indicates the important theoretical frameworks (i.e., developmental psychopathology and developmental ecological systems) employed by Volling et al. to advance our understanding of this critical transition in the life of the family. The longitudinal study design, sample characteristics, identification of possible trajectories of adjustment (or not) to the birth of the sibling, and selection of family and child variables are addressed. The sophisticated statistical methods (Growth Mixture Modeling and data mining procedures) employed to predict child adjustment in association with parenting variables over time and sibling relationship quality at 12 months identified low- and high-risk trajectories on the seven subscales of the Child Behavior Check List (CBCL). This afforded a nuanced investigation of a variety of potentially problematic child behaviors (e.g., aggression, withdrawal, negative emotionality, somatic problems) in association with parenting behaviors. A final discussion included study limitations, significant strengths, and implications for clinicians and other professionals. The study's conclusion is that most children and families are resilient, take the birth of a sibling in their stride, and do not exhibit empirical evidence of a developmental crisis, as argued by earlier psychodynamic authors.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.050 | 0.205 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.012 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.031 | 0.054 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".