Fernando García
Universiity of Valencia
Challenges in the Digital Society. A Third Stage in Parental Socialization?
Participants: Emilia Serra1; Olga Gómez-Ortiz2; Dolores Frías-Navarro1; María C. Fuentes1
1Universiy of Valencia ;2Universty of Cordoba
Symposium Summary
For years, empirical research has examined the impact of parental socialization on the psychosocial development of children and adolescents. The socializing parents’ behaviours have been conceptually organized on two theoretically orthogonal dimensions: affection and severity. Four styles are obtained from the combination of both dimensions: authoritative (affection with severity), indulgent (affection without severity), authoritarian (without affection but with severity) and neglectful (neither affection nor severity). Empirical evidence has highlighted the relevant influence of parents' behaviours on the psychosocial development of their children.
Classical studies consider that authoritative style could become a relevant factor related to optimal children development in some cultural contexts; meanwhile, the authoritarian style has been associated with certain psychological advantages in other cultural contexts. A new paradigm with three concurrent stages for an optimal parental style has been proposed in recent research. This paradigm completes the traditional parent styles with only two stages (authoritarian and authoritative parental style), developing a new third stage corresponding to the indulgent parental style. This symposium provides new fundamentally empirical evidence about the relationship between parental socialization styles and adjustment criteria in the digital society, which is a new challenge because there is a possibility that previous assumptions have to be reviewed.
Keywords: Family socialization, psychosocial adjustment, digital society.
Short CV
Professor of Research Methods and Designs in the Department of Methodology of Behavioural Sciences of the University of Valencia, where he conducts a research agenda on methodological topics (robust statistics, power analysis, and confidence intervals) and techniques to measure self-esteem and family socialization. He has also conducted several studies that have examined the cross-cultural validity of the family socialization model with four styles.
He has published a total of 44 books, among which the research design manuals used for teaching the subjects in the methodology area are highlighted. The most widespread papers are related to instruments that measure self-concept (successive versions of forms A and 5) for multidimensional measurement of this construct. Following by manuals and protocols of the ESPA29 scale, which measures family socialization based on the classic model of four typologies.
The greatest impact of this researcher's work within the scientific community (the Q index in JCR is 27) has been produced as a result of cross-culturally analysing of the classic family socialization model with four styles in relation to the adjustment or imbalance of children. He wrote a monograph about the topic “family socialization” (Parenting: Cultural Influences and Impact on Childhood Health and Well-Being) in 2015. He has recently been a Guest Editor for the special issue "Parental Socialization Styles in 21st Century and Adolescent Health and Well-being" in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health (Q1). Proposing the cross-cultural review of the relationship between family socialization styles and the consequences for children in the international arena.