A study of social attitude similarity between parents and children

Abstract

This study was designed to test three hypotheses: (1) College freshmen and sophomores will be more like their parents in social attitudes than will juniors and seniors, (2) The more dogmatic the parent, the more similar will be the child and parent in attitudes, and (3) The similarity in attitudes between parents and children will be higher if those parents are quite similar in attitudes. The sample consisted of fifty-seven family units in the Hays, Kansas, area. Each unit consisted of one child who was attending college while living with his biological parents. The students were given two fifteen-item clusters which were designed to determine attitudes toward the church and political economic conservatism. The parents were given the same attitude items as the children, as well as Bass's measure of the acquiescence response set and Rokeach's dogmatism scale. Cronbach and Gleser's D2 measure was used to evaluate the amount of similarity between the child's and parent's attitudes. The dogmatism scores were corrected for the acquiescence response set so that a truer indication of the amount of dogmatism in the parents could be had. It was concluded that college freshmen and sophomores were not more like their parents on the attitudes studied than juniors and seniors. Also, dogmatism in parents does not appear to significantly influence the child's attitudes in the direction of the parent's attitudes. Finally, the amount of similarity between parent's attitudes appears to be related to the amount of similarity between parents and their children on the attitudes studied.