A Quantitative Study of Relationship between Parenting Style and Adolescent's Self-esteem

摘要

As most studies on the relationship between parenting style and the self-esteem are done in the Western context and culture, this study tries to explore the relationship between the parenting style and the self-esteem of a group of adolescents in a National-type Chinese school (SMJK) in Penang. That is to explore the effects of Malaysian parenting styles towards the adolescents' self-esteem. Parental Authority Questionnaire (PAQ) and Rosenberg Self-Esteem (RSE) scale were distributed to 500 students from a national type secondary school, age 13-17 to obtain their perception of their parent's type of parenting style and their own level of self-esteem. The data obtained was further analyzed using SPSS to find out the correlations of self-esteem with various parenting styles. The SPSS results support the hypothesis of the study, that is parenting style does have correlation with self-esteem of students though the degree of correlation is rather small but statistically significant in this study. The adolescents' level of self-esteem is negatively influenced by their perceived parent's Authoritative or Permissive parenting style. Whereas, self-esteem is positively influenced by Authoritarian parenting style. Though the study results support the four hypotheses of the study, some of the hypothesis testing results are found to be different from previous studies found in literature. Other variables may have contributed to the study result. Future study in this area may need to isolate the influences in order to get a better picture of the relation of parenting style and self-esteem.