Role of Parental Attitude in Development of Aggressive Behavior among Adolescents

Purpose of the present investigation was to study the role of parental attitude in development of aggressive behavior among adolescents. The sample comprised of 200 (100 male and 100 female) undergraduate students of Aligarh Muslim University Aligarh. Parent-Child Relation Questionnaire (PCRQ) (Singh, 1984) was used for measuring parental attitude and Aggression Questionnaire (Buss & Perry, 1992) was used for measuring adolescents aggression. Pearson Product-Moment Correlation and t-test were used for analyzing the data. Result revealed that there was significant negative correlation between positive parental attitude and aggression. It was also found that there was significant positive correlation between negative parental attitude and aggression. When gender differences was conducted on same sample, it was found that in father‟s attitude, female students scored significantly higher on only one positive dimension of father‟s attitude i.e. disciplining out of three positive dimensions (i.e. loving, protecting and disciplining) in comparison to male students, while male students scored significantly higher on only one negative dimension of father‟s attitude i.e. punishing out of three negative dimensions (i.e. dominating, rejecting, and punishing) in comparison to female students. Similarly, in mother‟s attitude, the results revealed that female students also scored significantly higher on two positive dimension of mother‟s attitude (i.e. loving and disciplining) out of three positive dimensions in comparison to male students. The results also showed that male students scored significantly higher on all three negative dimension of mother‟s attitude in comparison to female students. Further it was found that male students scored significantly higher on all four dimensions of aggression (i.e. physical, verbal, anger and hostility) in comparison to female students.