Ecological momentary assessment of parental monitoring predicting academic performance in a sample of Colombian adolescents

Academic difficulties, particularly during adolescence, may lead to long-term patterns of academic failure and problems entering a successful career in adulthood. The present study aims to examine the association between Colombian adolescents’ perceptions of parental monitoring and their academic performance. Examination of the Colombian context creates the opportunity to add evidence on how much inequalities in the educational system (strongly linked with Colombian strict socioeconomic stratification) might modulate the association between parental monitoring and academic performance. For 7 days, 64 Colombian adolescents (44% males; Mage = 16.56, SD = .77; 72% belonging to low SES stratum) were prompted via mobile-phones to respond to questions about their perception of parental monitoring (e.g., “in this moment do your parents know where you are?”). Mother-, father-, and youth-reports of academic performance will be collected in the summer of 2019. We will examine associations between both mean level and (in)stability of daily parental monitoring and academic performance, controlling for previous academic performance (two years before). Instability of parental monitoring will be examined with the root mean square of successive differences (Ebner-Priemer & Trull, 2012). We will also test the moderating effect of SES stratification on the aforementioned association. One hypothesis is that lower mean-level and higher instability of parental monitoring will be associated with lower academic performance, especially for adolescents belonging to the low SES group. These results can advance research scientists’ knowledge about the interaction between parental monitoring and exposure to social inequalities on adolescents’ academic achievement.