Individual and familial antecedents of adolescent independence

The achievement of independence is one of the most difficult tasks that adolescents face. It requires them to achieve a sense of individuation or separateness from their family members. The purpose of this study was to investigate the extent to which adolescent familism, self-esteem, gender-role attitudes, and conformity to parents predicted the adolescent's perception of their independence from parents. In addition, this study included marital status, socioeconomic status, maternal employment, age of adolescent, family size, gender of parent and gender of adolescent in the model as control variables.

Data were collected through the use of a questionnaire that was administered at the only public senior high school located in a small community in eastern Tennessee. The responses of 599 adolescents, ages 14 to 20, whose parents were currently married or divorced were examined in this study. The model was analyzed by gender of parent/ gender of adolescent dyads using multiple regression. Additional analyses were conducted to examine each relationship for curvilinearity and to investigate gender differences between males and females in terms of independence from parents.

The results indicated that: a) self-esteem of male and female adolescents correlated positively with adolescents' perceptions of their independence from parents, b) sons and daughters who saw themselves as having higher familistic orientations perceived themselves as achieving independence from fathers, and c) a positive linear relationship existed between conformity to mothers and fathers and independence for daughters. Consequently, this study provided evidence that both individual (i.e. self-esteem) and familial (i.e. familism and conformity) variables influenced the adolescent's achievement of independence.