Disclosure and Secrecy in Adolescent–Parent Relationships

214 Smetana, Metzger, Gettman, and Campione-Barr
parent-differentiated perceptions of beliefs about the
legitimacy of parents’ authority or adolescents’ obligations
to disclose. It would be worthwhile in future
research to determine whether adolescents’
beliefs about these issues differ when considering
mothers and fathers. Likewise, we did not obtain an
assessment of parents’ perceptions of their adolescents’
secrecy, because of task demands as well as
concerns about whether parents know what they do
not know. Future research should examine parents’
knowledge of or perceptions of adolescents’ secrecy.
In this study, we restricted our assessment of
disclosure and secrecy to everyday activities, including
personal, peer, and schoolwork issues. It
would be especially important in future research to
examine disclosure regarding a broader set of issues,
including prudential behaviors (such as drug and
alcohol use, cigarette smoking, and sexual activity)
as well as other domains of misbehavior (such as
cutting classes or bullying). We did not obtain assessments
of disclosure regarding these behaviors
because our piloting indicated the need to differentiate
between adolescents who engage in these behaviors
but do not tell their parents and adolescents
who are not involved in the behaviors (and thus
have nothing to tell). Future research focusing on
normative samples of adolescents will need to disentangle
these issues carefully. Previous research has
shown that parents solicit more information when
their adolescents are more involved in problem behavior
(Kerr & Stattin, 2000; Tilton-Weaver & Galambos,
2003), but it would also be interesting to
examine the correlates of adolescents’ disclosure
over these aspects of adolescents’ behavior. Taking a
different approach, Darling et al. (2004) examined
how much adolescents disclose about issues of conflict.
However, this may provide an incomplete assessment
of disclosure, as there may be little conflict
about issues that are successfully concealed. For instance,
our results indicated that conflict intensity
was related to greater secrecy about peer issues, but
not personal or schoolwork issues.
The correlates examined here accounted for a
sizable proportion of the variance in disclosure, but
much less of the variance in secrecy. Thus, future
research needs to better identify the correlates of
secrecy, especially as Finkenauer et al. (2005) has
found that concealment in their sample had significant
but low associations with different dimensions
of parenting. Whereas disclosure may reflect normative
developmental processes of individuation,
the association between poor self-esteem and greater
secrecy (at least over schoolwork) suggests that secrecy
may have its roots in (mal)adjustment. This
hypothesis should be examined in future research
that includes a broader range of adjustment measures;
this might better illuminate Finkenauer et al.’s
(2002) claim that disclosure and secrecy are distinct.
Longitudinal research is needed to examine the
developmental trajectories and interrelationships
among beliefs about parental authority and adolescents’
obligations to disclose to parents and actual
disclosure. We hypothesize that authority beliefs influence
beliefs about adolescents’ obligation to disclose
to parents, which in turn influence disclosure.
As these constructs were assessed concurrently in
this study, however, the causal directions and mediating
(or potentially moderating) relationships
among the variables cannot be determined.
Disclosure and secrecy should also be examined
in a broader age range of adolescents, and adolescents’
justifications for disclosure or secrecy in different
domains should be investigated. Adolescents
may have different reasons for not disclosing or
concealing issues in the personal versus other domains,
and these reasons may be differentially related
to adjustment. Furthermore, as Darling et al.
(2004) have found, disclosure and secrecy are only
two of several possible strategies adolescents may
have for managing information, and more research
on adolescents’ strategies for managing different
types of issues is needed.
Although our participation rates were good and
our sample appeared to be representative of the
larger school district from which it was drawn, previous
research has indicated that well-functioning
families are overrepresented in family research, especially
when active informed consent procedures
are used (Weinberger, Tublin, Ford, & Feldman,
1990), as was done here. Thus, future research might
include both normative and at-risk youth. Furthermore,
future research should examine disclosure and
secrecy in different ethnic and racial groups, as it is
likely that disclosure and secrecy in adolescent –
parent relationships may have different meanings in
different cultural contexts.
Finally, the results of this study have implications
for the recent debates about parental knowledge and
parental monitoring. It has been claimed (Crouter &
Head, 2002; Kerr & Stattin, 2000) that most measures
of parental monitoring are actually measures of parental
knowledge, which come primarily from adolescent
disclosure in the context of trusting parent –
child relationships. Our results confirm the salience
of trust in adolescent disclosure, but we also found
that, even in good relationships, parents overestimate
their adolescents’ disclosure, particularly at
middle adolescence and with regard to peers. This