Child and Adolescent Development

Child and Adolescent Development

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION3

Hypotheses4

METHODOLOGY4

Research Design4

Participants4

Procedure5

Measurements5

Reported Father and Mother Involvement.6

Satisfaction of Parent-child Relationship.7

RESULTS7

Linear Regression between Reported Parental Involvement and the Satisfaction of Parent-Child Relationship8

DISCUSSIONS10

Child and Adolescent Development

INTRODUCTION

Families and parenting have long been a research concern over the decades. Nevertheless, only in recent years have cross-cultural studies of parent-child socialization been investigated to understand the diversity of roles that fathers and mothers assume in the family (Benetti & Roopnarine, 2006; Finley, Mira & Schwartz, 2008). This research area gained momentum particularly after the social revolution during the 1960s and the 1970s. The broad social changes appear to affect and restructure the family forms and parental involvement. Although much research has been done in the parenting area, very few studies have been conducted to investigate the differential involvement of the father and the mother to a child's development. Therefore, this study aims to study the effects of different dimensions of parental involvement on the satisfaction of parent-child relationship.

As one of the important interpersonal relationships in a person's life, the parent-child relationship is commonly described as the socialization between a parent and child (Sears, 1951). Maccoby (1992) further illustrates "socialization" as a mutual, reciprocal, relationship-based enterprise between the parent and the child. Other researchers, on the other hand, characterise the parent-child relationship based on the level of positive effect, involvement, communication, identification, anger and resentment (Fine, Moreland & Schwebel, 1983). Additionally, a recent study by Mo and Singh (2008) measured the parent child relationship by using a composite of five items: (1) parents care about you; (2) family understands you; (3) want to leave home; (4) have fun together and; (5) family pays attention to you.

Hypotheses

Specifically, this study tested two hypotheses: (1) the father's instrumental involvement (as compared to expressive involvement and mentoring/advising involvement) predicts a higher level of satisfaction in a father-child relationship; and (2) the mother's expressive involvement (as compared to instrumental involvement and mentoring/advising involvement) predicts a higher level of satisfaction in a mother-child relationship.

METHODOLOGY

Research Design

A single survey was conducted to obtain the data for this study. Voluntary participants of 18 to 25 years old were approached via convenient sampling. The independent variable consists of the perceived parental involvement (fathers and mothers) while the dependent variable was the satisfaction of parent-child relationship.

Participants

The participants consisted of 100 male and 100 female students from public universities (i.e., Universiti Sains Malaysia, Universiti Malaya, and Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia) and a private university college (Sunway University College) in Malaysia. The students were aged between 18 and 25 years old (M = 21.07, SD = 1.75). There were 22 Malays (11.0%), 162 Chinese (81.0%), and 16 Indians (8.0%). In terms of religion, there were 22 Muslims (11.0%), 33 Christians (16.5%), 120 Buddhists (60.0%), 11 Hindus (5.5%) and 14 participants (7.0%) who had other religions (see Table 1). All of the 200 participants (100%) were from intact families and reported as single. The rationale for recruiting only participants from intact families is that Parsons and Bales (1955) once stated: In a "normal" nuclear ...