The influence of university students' perceived paternal and maternal acceptance, father involvement and depressive symptoms on their resiliency

Abstract

The present study investigated the influence and association among perceived paternal acceptance, maternal acceptance, father involvement, depressive symptoms and perceived resiliency among 379 university undergraduate students in Istanbul with the mean age of twenty one years and six months. The independent variables of this study were: perceived paternal acceptance, perceived maternal acceptance, perceived father involvement, and perceived depressive symptoms while perceived resiliency was the dependent variable. Personal Data Sheet, Resiliency Scale, Parental Acceptance-Rejection Questionnaire (Child PARQ-Turkish Short Form), Father Involvement Scale (FIS-Turkish Form), Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale (CES-D [NIMH] Turkish Form) and Beck Depression Inventory (Turkish Form) were used for data collection. Data analysis was conducted through SPSS and Structural Equation Modeling, in AMOS software statistics program. Results indicated that for university students perceived mother acceptance and depressive symptoms had a significant effect on resiliency, explaining 41 % of the variance. When data was analyzed separately for gender it was seen that for male university students, perceived maternal acceptance, depressive symptoms and perceived father involvement had a significant influence on resiliency explaining 45 % variance of resiliency. For female university students, depressive symptoms had a significant influence on resiliency with 39 % of the variance. It was also seen that perceived paternal acceptance had a significant relation to father involvement, for the total student sample (β=.71) in the study as well as for males (β=.67) and females (β=.72) when the data was analyzed according to gender, The implications of these findings, specifically the positive influence of maternal acceptance and the negative influence of depressive symptoms on resiliency of university youth can be translated into the work of counselors for health promotion of this population.