Adolescents also participated in an 8-minute supportive behavior interaction task with their mothers at age 13, during which they asked for help with a “problem they were having that they could use some advice or support about.” Typical topics included problems with peers or siblings, raising money, or deciding about joining sports teams. These interactions were coded using the Supportive Behavior Coding System (Allen et al., 2001), which was based on several related systems (Crowell et al., 1998; Julien et al., 1997). Maternal support was reliably coded as the degree to which mothers expressed warmth, positivity, and valuing of the adolescent using an average of the scores obtained by two trained raters blind to other data from the study, with excellent reliability (Intraclass correlation =.77).
