2000 Volume 14 Issue 1 Pages 41-59
This study examined the relations among parents-child communication, interpersonal consciousness, and identity in late adolescence. Thirty Japanese families (including undergraduate student and their both parents) participated in Family Interaction Task used to measure family individuation (proposed by Grotevant and Cooper's Family Process Project). In this task, subjects were asked to make plans together for one week vacation. The first 300 uterances of each family were coded in terms of 14 indices of individuation. In addition to this task, adolescents completed two kinds of questionnaires to assess interpersonal consciousness and identity status two times at regular intervals.
As a result, sex difference was found in the correlations between parents-child communication and other personality features. For males, separateness from mother was related to negative interpersonal consciousness. For females, on the other side, separateness from father was related to negative interpersonal consciousnsess and identity. The key finding suggested the significance of connectedness in the relationship between late adolescents and parent of the opposite sex.
