Parental attitudes in the play centre : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Education at Massey University
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Date
1971
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Massey University
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Abstract
It is an expressed opinion of the New Zealand Play Centre Federation that parental involvement in the Play Centre will be effective in allowing husbands and wives to gain more understanding of their role as parents. If this were so it could be expected that there would be some modification of these parents' attitudes towards children and the family during the period of the association. This study was planned to examine these expectations as it was considered that the Play Centre movement would benefit from some knowledge of the parental attitudes of its members and of the effectiveness of its programmes and as well whether sex differences were apparent in parental attitudes and their modification. It was hypothesised that parental involvement would increase the accuracy of parents' understanding of Play Centre ideas and would help modify parental attitudes to become more like those of the Play Centre but that parental would neither achieve complete understanding nor completely accept Play Centre's point of view. It was also predicted that there would be sex differences in the perception and modification of parental attitudes. A modified form of the Parental Attitude Research Instrument, renamed the Parent Attitude Survey questionnaire, was administered to two groups of parents (both partners) who were matched so that a comparison of attitudes on a pre- and post-involvement basis could be made. The subjects were asked to respond to the PASQ first as though stating their own point of view and second as though stating the Play Centre's point of view. A group of Play Centre experts were asked to respond to the PASQ as though stating the Play Centre point of view, to give some measure of Play Centre attitudes. The responses of 133 subjects (including the 76 subjects of the test group) to the 128 items of the PASQ were intercorrelated and factor analysed using the principal components solution rotated to normalized Varimax structure. The ten factors were taken as the attitude factor scales. A second-order factor analysis revealed two factors, an authoritarian-restrictiveness scale and a democratic-permisseiveness scale. Mean scores of the test and expert groups on the ten-factor-scales were compared using the t-Test of significant difference but these comparisons revealed little significant difference between group mean scores except between the attitudes of parents and of the Play Centre and between parents perception of Play Centre attitudes and the attitudes of the Play Centre. In terms of the original problem this would seem to raise some doubts about the effectiveness of the Play Centre's parent education programme at least for this group, in that parents did not have a very accurate perception of the parental attitudes of the Play Centre, that there was not an appreciable shift in parental attitudes during the time of involvement in the Play Centre, that the parents' and the Play Centre's attitudes did differ significantly and that the anticipated differences in parental attitudes between husbands and Wives who are differently involved in the Play Centre, were not apparent. Caution must be expressed however as to the generalization of these comments to the total Play Centre population in view of the limitations of the investigation, the small and specialized sample and the difficulty of measuring accurately parental attitudes. Scores on four of the factor scales appeared reliable enough to give some indication of the parental attitudes of the total sample. In general these Play Centre parents were more permissive and democratic in their attitudes towards their pre-school-age children than the New Zealand literature would indicate. Suggestions for more detailed research in this area are indicated by the findings of this preliminary investigation and include the refinement of an instrument to measure parental attitudes, their relation to personality variables, marriage patterns and sex roles in marriage, and the accuracy of the transfer of Play Centre ideas and policy at a regional and local level.
Description
Appendix 6-8 can be viewed in the copy in the library.
Keywords
Community centers, Attitude (Psychology)