Influence of Parenting Styles and Developmental Stages on Identity Formation among Adolescents

Paternal attitudes, beliefs and behaviors that appear as family pattern or parenting styles play a key role in personality development and stabilizing the identity of adolescents. The present study assesses parenting styles and identity formation status of adolescents studying in and around Mysore city. A total of 400 adolescents (200 early and 200 late adolescents) were randomly selected covering Mysore city and nearby rural areas, of which equal number among were male and female adolescents and also equal number of them were from urban and rural areas. They were provided with Parental authority questionnaire (PAQ) developed by Buri (1991) and Aspects of Identity Questionnaire – IV (AIQ – IV) developed by Sampson (1978). PAQ measured perceived parenting styles.  The AIQ scale measured personal, Relational Social and Collective areas of identity formation. The collected data were, coded and analyzed using SPSS software. The data was analyzed by Two-way ANOVA to find significant difference if any, in the developmental stages, area of living as well as gender of the participants.  Results revealed that, adolescents with authoritarian Parenting styles had higher personal identity formation than adolescents with permissive and authoritarian parenting styles. Developmental stage showed significant influence on all components of identity-Personal, Relational, Social and Collective, where in early stage adolescents had higher identity than adolescents at later stage.  In general, this study showed that the developmental stages had considerable effect on the collective identity formation in both early and late adolescents.