Relationships between perceived parental acceptance-rejection, psychological adjustment, and substance abuse among young adults.
This study examined the relationship between perceived parental acceptance-rejection, psychological adjustment, and substance abuse. A volunteer sample of 40 young adult substance abusers was compared to a comparable volunteer sample of 40 nonabusers with respect to individuals' perceptions of paternal and maternal acceptance-rejection and psychological adjustment. Discriminant function analysis using the jackknife procedure was utilized to examine the predictive power and the classification accuracy of perceived parental acceptance-rejection and psychological adjustment. Results of the research show that: (a) Both perceived paternal and maternal rejection in childhood tend to be significantly higher among substance abusers than among nonabusers, and; (b) substance abusers are more impaired in their current psychological adjustment than are nonabusers. These two classes of predictor variables yield a correlation of .77 with group membership (i.e., abusers vs. nonabusers), and the three predictor variables successfully discriminate substance abusers from nonabusers with jackknifed classification accuracy of 87.5%. Adding the demographic variable "education level" to the model raises the jackknifed classification accuracy to 91.2%, yielding only seven misclassifications in the total sample of 80 volunteers.
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Tolland Center for Family Therapy, CT.
Rohner
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D000223:Adaptation, Psychological; D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D004522:Educational Status; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D010287:Parent-Child Relations; D010555:Personality Inventory; D012059:Rejection, Psychology; D012923:Social Class; D019966:Substance-Related Disorders / Q000145:classification*