Association between Social Adjustment and Perceived Parenting Styles in Punctual, Truant, and High Achieving School Going Students: A Moderating Model

Abstract

Background: School truancy is remain an unresolved and a major persistent problem in high schools for public health globally for last many years. Commonly, school truancy is considered one of the most important as a risk factor for parenting styles and social adjustment that leads to other negative outcomes for school-going students. The association between social adjustment and parenting styles in school student is well known.  However, there is a lack of researches on this unique topic as well as the interaction among school truancy, social adjustment, and parenting styles. This present study examined the association between social adjustment and parenting styles in punctual, truant, and high achieving school going students.

Methods: A purposive sampling technique and cross-sectional research design were used to carry out this research. One  hundred  fifty  three participants (truant students, n =51; punctual students , n= 51; high achieving students , n= 51), with age ranged from  12 to 18 (M = 16.82, SD = 1.01) years were enrolled  from  public schools  of Rawalpindi and  Islamabad, Pakistan.

Results: This  study’s results  demonstrated  that there was  found  statistically positive or negative  association between social adjustment and parenting styles  in punctual, truant, and high achieving school going students . Additionally, this study illustrated that truancy’s types moderated on the association between subscales of social adjustment and parenting styles.

Conclusions: This present study’s results suggested that complex moderating interaction between truancy’s types and parenting styles can be enhanced to sustain and promote social adjustment issues in school-going students. Prospectively, permissive and authoritarian parenting styles   with truancy’s types   significantly positively predicts the social adjustment issue in Pakistan’s school students. Further, this current research clearly illustrated the need of early screening for comprehending and recognizing nature of parenting styles and social adjustment problems for management and treatment of the emerging issues   in Pakistan schools.