Sarah Cusworth, Kelly McCoy, Family Sciences
College Adjustment
A factor analysis (principal component analysis, Varimax rotation method) of the 28 college adjustment questions yielded eight factors. Five of these factors closely related to the five subsections in the adjustment measure. Because the questions hung together in the analysis it was assumed that the questionnaire was a good measure of the variables we were studying. The five subsections included peer relations, faculty relations, perception of faculty concern, academic/intellectual development, and institutional/goal commitments. The factor analysis provided some interesting insights to some interrcorrelations between scales.
Factor one: The six questions relating to peer relations comprised factor one, along with question 24 (.694), “I am confident that I made the right decision in choosing to attend BYU,” which was included in the section on institutional/goal commitments. The correlation is interesting because it suggests that satisfaction with BYU is related to peer relations.
Factor two: The second factor that emerged consisted of questions that dealt with faculty relations and perception of faculty concern. Five of the questions included come from the section designed to measure student’s experience with faculty. The remaining question “Few of the faculty members I have had contact with are generally interested in students” was actually listed under the faculty/concern section. Its inclusion, however, in factor two makes sense since the two sections are very similar; the intercorrelation between the two sections was significant at the .01 level (two-tailed).
Factor three: The third factor represented intellectual development. The questions included were mainly derived from the academic/intellectual development section with one interesting exclusion, number 20: “Few of my courses this year have been intellectually stimulating.” Also included in the factor was question 4, a measure of peer relations that stated whether the student’s peers had had a positive influence on intellectual development. Once again, the role of peers seems to have a great deal of influence on academic adjustment.
Factor four: All of the questions comprising factor four were stated negatively in the questionnaire (e.g. “Few of the faculty members I have had contact with are generally interested in students). This suggests that, perhaps, the wording of the questions affected the answers more than the actual meanings. Three of the questions were derived from the section faculty concern, one from acadmeic/intellectual and one from peer relations. That these particular questions hung together may also suggest that poor adjustment to college is related to a number of factors, rather than to just a particular set.
Factor five: The fifth factor contained variables related to institutional/goal commitment and one question from academic/intellectual: “My interest in ideas and intellectual matter has increased since coming to BYU.”
Parental Styles
The parental styles included in the study were authoritative, authoritarian and permissive. The alpha reliabilities for each scale were as follows: father authoritative, .8799; mother authoritative, .8651; mother authoritarian, .8224; father authoritarian, .8447; father permissive, .7475; and mother permissive, .7659. Because of the good alpha scores, these were judged as adequate scales to use as measures of parental style. A factor analysis demonstrated that although there was a fair amount of intercorrelation between the scales, suggesting that they were not entirely separate measures of parental authority, the scales hung together enough to justify using them as they were represented in the Parental Authority Questionnaire (PAQ). A few of the questions (e.g. number8) did not seem to correlate very highly with any one scale but since their exclusion from the analysis would not have increased the alpha scores significantly they were left in the data set.
Parental Authoritativeness and College Adjustment
Because the college adjustment scales were fairly independent of each other, based on our results and those of others, we measured the parental styles against each of the separate subsections to determine where parental influence had the most effect (1). Therefore, one score of college adjustment was not calculated; rather, each subsection was regarded as an independent measure of adjustment. The only parental style that evidenced any significance in positive correlation to college adjustment was authoritative. Specifically, a combined score of authoritative parenting correlated with peer relations at the .05 level (two-tailed, Pearson correlation), and father authoritative alone correlated with peer relations significantly at the .01 level (two-tailed). Mother authoritative by itself did not reach significance. Father authoritarian correlated negatively with peer relations at the .05 level (two-tailed).
Conclusion
Consistent with the hypothesis that parental style would affect peer relations and therefore college adjustment, the results of this study indicate that the best parental predictor of peer relations is authoritative and that peer relations are integrally connected with satisfaction in college. While no definite conclusions can be drawn concerning the direction of causality in these relationships, the results suggest that the best way to improve adjustment while students are at college would be to promote positive peer relations.
References
- Pascarella, E.T., Terenzini, P.T. (1980). Predicting freshman persistence and voluntary dropout decisions from a theoretical model. Journal of Higher Education, 51, 60-75.