Parenting styles and their relation to teenagers' personality profile in single mother families: a case study

Abstract

This study aims to identify the parenting style and its relationship with the personality profile of adolescents in single mothers’ families in Sekolah Dato ‘Usman Awang, Taman Perling, Johor Bharu. This study involved the use of questionnaire on a total of 82 respondents. a total of 82 The questionnaire was subdivided into three parts. Part A covers the background of the respondents and their mother; part B involves the Parental Behavior Inventory (PBI) which measures the parenting style of single mothers, while part C measures participants’ personality profile using Big Five Personality Test (BFI). Data were analysed using Statistical Package for the Social Science (SPSS 16.0). Descriptive analysis is used to answer objectives 1 and 2 by using frequency, percentage, mean and standard deviation, while inferential analysis is used to answer the third objective of the correlation method. The findings showed that parenting style which is most widely practiced in single-parent families is the authoritative parenting style with M = 1.33, or 39.70%, followed by authoritarian with M = 1:03 or 30.75% and permissive with M = 0.99 or 29.55%. In addition, the study also showed the Agreeableness personality is the most dominant personality with M = 2.99, or 21.27%, followed by Extraversion personality with M = 2.80, or 20:33% and Openness to Experience with M = 2.79, or 20:26%. The analysis also reveals that authoritarian parenting style has a significant relationship with Openness to Experience and Conscientiousness personality profiles. However, there is no significant relationship between authoritative and permissive parenting style of single mothers with all other personality profile