Gender and Territorial Location as Predictors of Perceived Maternal Acceptance/Rejection Attitudes among College Students

The present study is aimed to see the effect of gender (male and female) and location differences (urban/rural) upon Perceived Maternal Acceptance/ Rejection Attitudes among college students. Sample of the study consisted of 200 (100 males and 100 females) respondents. A two-staged sampling method was adopted for selection of respondents. In the first stage two urban and two rural colleges imparting degree level college education were randomly sampled from the Muzaffarpur district in Bihar. In the second stage 25 male and 25 female students were randomly sampled. Thus, the total numbers of two hundred respondents were sampled by using stratified random sampling methods. Stratification was done on the basis of gender and habitat. The parental acceptance-rejection questionnaire (PARQ) developed by Rohner (1979) was used for studying attitude of perceived maternal acceptance and rejection. Means, standard deviations, t-tests, were used to analyze the data. The results reject the null hypothesis that there is no significant difference in the perceived maternal acceptance/rejection as in out of four scales significant differences were found in three of them; warmth/affection, aggression/hostility, rejection/differentiated. On neglect/indifference no significant difference was found and on the total PARQ the differences were found to be significant.