Mediating effect of pubertal stages on the family environment and neurodevelopment: A conceptual replication and multiverse analysis of an ABCD Study®

Increasing evidence demonstrates that environmental factors meaningfully impact the development of the brain (Hyde et al., 2020; McEwen & Akil, 2020). Recent work from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study® suggests that puberty may indirectly account for some association between the family environment and brain structure and function (Thijssen et al., 2020). However, a limited number of large studies have evaluated what, how, and why environmental factors impact neurodevelopment. When these topics are investigated, there is typically inconsistent operationalization of variables between studies which may be measuring different aspects of the environment and thus different associations in the analytic models. Multiverse analyses (Steegen et al., 2016) are an efficacious technique for investigating different operationalizations of the same construct on underlying interpretations. While one of the assets of Thijssen et al. (2020) was its large sample from the ABCD data, the authors used an early release that contained 38% of the full ABCD sample. The analyses used several ‘researcher degrees of freedom’ (Gelman & Loken, 2014) to operationalize key independent, mediating and dependent variables, including but not limited to, the use of a latent factor of preadolescents’ environment comprised of different subfactors, such as parental monitoring and child family conflict. While latent factors can improve reliability of constructs, the nuances of each subfactor and measure that comprise the environment may be lost, making the latent factors difficult to interpret in the context of individual differences. Therefore, this study extends the work of Thijssen et al. (2020) by evaluating the extent that the analytic choices in their study affected their conclusions using multiverse analyses. In Aim 1, using the same variables and models, we extend findings from the original study using the full sample in Release 3.0. Then, in Aim 2, we employ a multiverse analysis to consider nine alternative operationalizations of family, three of puberty, and five of brain measures (total of 135 models) to evaluate the impact on conclusions from Aim 1. We then demonstrate and discuss how different environmental and demographic measures intended to capture stressful experiences in the ABCD data may differentiate findings and interpretations as they relate to puberty and the brain and make recommendations for the future studies using large open datasets, such as the ABCD study.