| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立臺北教育大學 === 心理與諮商學系碩士班 === 101 === The purpose of this study is to investigate whether there is a significant difference in Psychological Separation-Individuation development between female college students whose fathers became absent in different periods of the students’ life, and between students whose father are physically or psychologically absent and students whose fathers are physically or psychologically present. Group testing and internet survey were conducted to female students of a national university and 630 questionnaires were retrieved, among which 284 questionnaires were valid. The content of the questionnaire included personal background information questionnaire, Separation-Individuation Test, Father Attachment Scale and Mother Attachment Scale. The frequency distributions, percentages, means and standard deviations of retrieved data were calculated and Statistic analysis including One-way ANOVA and Two-way ANOVA were performed. Research findings are listed below:
1.The parental state of our sample female college students: (1) 81% of their parents were
married to each other, 18% of them divorced, 1% were in other marital states. (2) 88% of
the students lived with their parents; the other 12% were not living with their parents.
For students whose parents were divorced, 76% lived with their mothers, while the other
23% were not living with their mothers. (3) The majority (about 75%) of students from two-
parent families meet their father daily, while about 39% of students from single-parent
families meet their father once a year or even less often. (4) As a whole, female college
students have moderate attachments with their fathers.
2.For the majority of the 284 female college students in our formal samples, their fathers
were physically present. Students whose fathers were physically absent made up about 18%
of our formal samples. Students whose fathers were psychologically present were also the
majority in our formal samples. 36% of the students’ fathers were psychologically absent
in the formal samples.
3.As a whole, the Psychological Separation-Individuation developments of female college
students were moderate and didn’t differ significantly in vaious aspects of Separation-
Individuation developments.
4.Students whose father became absent in different periods of their life didn’t differ
significantly in their scores on various subscales of Psychological Separation-
Individuation Test.
5.Female college students whose fathers are physically presence scored higher on engulfment
anxiety than students whose father is physically absent. Female college students whose
fathers are psychologically absent scored higher on separation anxiety than students
whose father is psychologically present.
6.No interaction between the effects of father’s physical absence and father’s
psychological absence was found. Students whose fathers are absent in different ways
didn’t differ significantly in their scores on various subscales of Psychological
Separation-Individuation Test.
Conclusion: There was no significant difference in most subscale scores of Psychological Separation-Individuation Test between students whose fathers were physically present or absent. Their scores did differ significantly in engulfment anxiety subscale, but the difference in scores on the whole scale was insignificant. We further investigated whether students’ mother attachment were predictive of their Psychological Separation-Individuation scores or not. We found out that for students whose fathers were physically absent, their mother attachment were moderately predictive of their scores on dependency denial, engulfment anxiety, and healthy separation, which were more predictive than students whose fathers were physically present, for whom mother attachments were only weakly predictive. This indicated that mother can effect student’s Psychological Separation-Individuation development. When facing Separation-Individuation process, female college students whose fathers are psychologically absent will experience excessive anxiety due to fear of losing significant others, and they are less mature in regards of the separation anxiety aspect of Psychological Separation-Individuation development. Father’s physical absence and father’s psychological absence could only account for 1.8% and 2% of variance in students’ scores on Psychological Separation-Individuation Test.
Discussion is made based on the result of this study. Implications for educational practice and guidance, and possible directions for further research are proposed.
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