Parental childrearing styles and sex roles of dependency traits.

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to explore the relationship between parental childrearing practices and sex role orientation with the development of dependency traits. Participants were 99 volunteer undergraduates (27 men and 72 women) from a mid sized university between the ages of 18 and 24 who were raised in a two-parent household for at least a period of seven years. They completed the Interpersonal Dependency Inventory (IDI), the Bern Sex Role Inventory (BSRI), the Parental Authority Questionnaire (PAQ), and a demographic questionnaire. To test whether participants who report authoritarian parental practices would have higher dependency scores than those who report authoritative or permissive parental practices, eight one-way analyses of variance were calculated, using the participants' PAQ classification scores for each parent to analyze scores on the IDI (illI total score and each of the three subscales). No support was found to verify the first hypothesis. One-way analyses ofvariance examining the difference in ID1 scores (IDI total score and each of the three subscales) based on sex role orientation ¥.'ere performed. Participants who were classified as feminine had higher IDI scores than participants who were categorized as masculine, androgynous, and undifferentiated. Also, two correlation coefficients were calculated on each parent of the participants PAQ scores to test the hypothesis that authoritarian PAQ scores would be positively correlated with femininity scores of the BSRI. No correlation was found to support the third hypothesis. Four 1tests were calculated using gender and the IDI (the IDI total score and each of the three subscales) to assess possible differences in dependency between men and women. The! test comparison for the subscale scores revealed the men's Assertion of Autonomy mean was significantly higher than the women's. This difference suggests men tend to deny dependency more than women.