Attitude And Aggression In Adolescence Essay

UG4-0826

Parental attitude and Aggression in adolescents

Introduction: Adolescent maturation is a personal phase of development where children have to establish their own beliefs, values, and what they want to accomplish out of life. Because adolescents constantly and realistically appraise themselves, they are often characterized as being extremely self-conscious. However, the self-evaluation process leads to the beginning of long-range goal setting, emotional and social independence, and the making of a mature adult. Conventional wisdom holds that adolescence is a period of 'storm and stress ', characterized by moodiness, inner turmoil and rebellion. One major question in psychology is about the reasons behind the problem of violence and

The random sampling technique was used for collecting data. Age of the subjects ranged between 19 to 21 years, the mean age being 20.5 years. All the students belonged to upper middle class socio-economic background.

Methods Used: Following questionnaires were used for measuring the central variables-

a) Parent-child relation questionnaire (PCRQ) - In order to assess the parental attitudes or child rearing style, parent-child relation questionnaire (PCRQ) developed by Singh (1984) was used. The PCRQ consists of two forms- the father form and the mother form. Each form has six subscales i.e. loving, dominating, rejecting, protecting, punishing and disciplining. Out of these six dimensions of parental attitudes, three dimensions or subscale are positive (i.e. loving, protecting and disciplining) and other three dimensions or subscale are negative .(i.e. dominating, rejecting and punishing).

b)Aggression Questionnaire- The Aggression Questionnaire (Buss, & Perry, 1992) was used for measuring adolescents aggressive behavior. It contains 29 self-report items assessing cognitive, affective, and behavioral components of this domain. Subscales include Hostility (i.e., hostile cognition), Anger (i.e., hostile affect), Physical aggression, and Verbal

While negative parental attitude (both father and mother) play a crucial role in developing aggressive behavior among adolescents, as it was found in present study that negative parental attitude was positively correlated with aggression. Similarly, it is also that mother 's attitude are more important in experienced of aggression among adolescents as compared to fathers attitude. As it is clear from this study that mothers negative attitudes play significant role in developing aggressive behavior among