Poster #22 - Father, Mother and Adolescents’ Agreement on Parental Rejection under Different Cultural Values

• In Event: 2-001 - Poster Session 1 during Breakfast

Abstract

Parental rejection is associated with children’s maladaptive outcomes like hostility, aggression or emotional unstability (Rohner, et al., 2012). However, Jager et al. (2016) found that children’s and parent’s perceptions of parental rejection did not fully align, such that portions of each overlapped with another (i.e., the dyad’s shared perspective) and portions of each did not overlap (i.e., dyad members’ unique perspectives). Moreover, shared and unique perspectives of parental rejection had varying effects on child adjustment (Jager et al., 2016). Given the differential effects of shared and unique perspectives of parental rejection, it is important to further elucidate the factors that moderate their overall size. Here, utilizing a multinational sample of US and Chinese adolescents, we examined whether the size of unique and shared perspectives of parental rejection depended on the family’s cultural background. Specifically, we examined whether families who were more collectivistic, which means more interdependent within their in-groups (Triandis, 2001), had child-parent dyads who reported larger shared (i.e., more overlapping or highly correlated) perspectives of parental rejection.

Participants were drawn from the secondary data source Parenting Across Cultures and included adolescents (51% female) and their parents who either resided in the US (n = 183) or China (n = 213). Data were collected when adolescents were around 12 years old (M = 12.45, SD = .61). Adolescents, mothers, and fathers reported parental rejection using Parental Acceptance–Rejection/Control Questionnaire-Short Form (Rohner et al. 2012), which yielded three subscales: hostility/aggression, undifferentiated rejection, and indifference/neglect. Mothers and fathers reported collectivism using a 16-item scale adapted from Singelis et al. (1995), Tam et al., (2003) and Triandis (1995).

Based on parents’ reports of collectivism, we divided participants into a high and a low collectivistic groups. Then we compared each pair of correlation coefficients among mother’s, father’s, and adolescent’s reports on parental rejection. In contrast to our hypothesis, results of Fisher r-to-z transformation showed that the correlation between father’s and adolescent’s reports on father’s hostility/aggression was higher in the low collectivistic group, r(127) = .455, than in the high collectivistic group, r(201) = .210, z = 2.43, p = .02. No other differences were found. Results suggested that being more collectivistic may actually predict lower agreement among family members’ reports of parental rejection. It is possible that family members from more collectivistic cultures are less comfortable openly discussing or addressing dyad-level hostility, and consequently a consensus is less likely to be formed.

Authors

• Xiaoye Xu, Arizona State University
  Presenting Author

• Sonya Xinyue Xiao, Arizona State University

• Justin Jager, Arizona State University