Socio-psychological factors of students’ agreement with parental messages

Abstract

The transformations affecting family and family relations in modern society highlight the relevance of studying how contemporary youth perceive the values and ideas transmitted by parents through parental messages. The article presents the results of a study examining the role of certain sociopsychological factors (such as gender, number of friendships, parental figure transmitting certain ideas and attitudes, themes and valence of parental messages) in the manifestation of agreement with parental messages among student youth. The study involved 49 students studying in universities of Uzbekistan (26 females; mean age 21.7 years). Parental messages, their content and valence, and agreement or disagreement with them were studied using a modified version of the projective technique ‘Mom always said... Dad always said...’ by R. Sherman and N. Fredman. The ’ self-designed questionnaire was used to collect socio-demographic data, information about the number of close friends, and other relevant variables. The findings showed that students had a fairly high degree of agreement with parental messages, with stronger agreement with mothers’ messages than with fathers’ messages (p ≤ 0.05), including on topics such as feelings (p ≤ 0.05), sex (p ≤ 0.01), and women (p ≤ 0.01). The valence of parental messages was found to mediate agreement or disagreement with parents’ opinions: positive messages were accepted and supported, while negative ones elicited differentiation between parental figures. Students tended to disagree with negative parental messages. The study also established the role of friendship relations: students with a greater number of close friends were less likely to agree with parental messages, including those with positive valence.