Doctoral Dissertations

Date of Award

12-1984

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Major Professor

Gary W. Peterson

Committee Members

Jo Lynn Cunningham, Thomas C. Hood, Priscilla White

Abstract

Traditional studies of parent-child relationships have been focused on the impact of parental characteristics on various social and personality outcomes in children and adolescents. During the past two decades, a number of social scientists challenged this paradigm, suggesting that offspring can also have Impact on their parents. Parents, for example, may report satisfaction from feelings of success in parental roles as evidenced by specific characteristics or resources of adolescents. In accordance with these ideas, the purpose of this study was to examine how parental perceptions of dimensions of adolescent social competence (i.e., companionship, independence, expert power, legitimate power, referent power, reward power, and coercive power) predicted the parents' satisfaction. The six sociodemographic control variables used for the study were father's occupational level, number of children, marital status, mother's employment status, gender of adolescent, and residential status.

This investigation was part of a larger research project on parent adolescent relationships conducted during the winter of 1982. Questionnaire data were collected from parents of adolescents from a small community and the surrounding rural area in eastern Tennessee. Because of the small number of minority parents, the population for the present study includes only the white parents (316 mothers and 313 fathers). Operationallzatlon of the measures for dimensions of adolescent social competence and parental satisfaction involved the construction of new items and scales. Separate Internal consistency reliability coefficients (Cronbach's alphas) were computed for each dimension of social competence and parental satisfaction. The control variabies were father's occupational level, number of children, marital status, mother's employment status, gender of adolescent, and residential status.

The theoretical model developed for the study was tested through the use of multiple regression analysis. Separate regression models were used to analyze the mother-adolescent and father-adolescent dyads. Both models supported the predicted positive relationships between parental satisfaction and three predictor variables; (a) companionship, (b) referent power, and (c) reward power. Partial support was found for the predicted positive relationship between expert power and parental satisfaction. No support was found for the hypotheses pertaining to independence, legitimate power, or coercive power. The control variables receiving partial support were number of children and marital status. It was concluded that parental perceptions of several dimensions of adolescent social competence predicted parental satisfaction.

Download
Files over 3MB may be slow to open. For best results, right-click and select "save as..."

Share

COinS