RELATIONS BETWEEN PERSONALITY TRAITS AND PARENTING STYLES ASSESSMENT IN STUDENTS

Personality traits play an important role in almost all aspects of an individual's functioning and are one of the bases for assessing the way parents raise children.Therefore, the question arises as to how young people with different personality traits perceive their parents and what their experience of closeness, emotional warmth/coldness, and set boundaries is.The aim of the research reported here was to examine whether personality traits and gender can be a basis for predicting parents' educational styles.The ZKPQ (Zuckerman-Kuhlman Personality Questionnaire) (Zuckerman et al., 1999) questionnaire was chosen to measure the following basic personality traits: activity, aggressiveness, sensation seeking, neuroticism, sociability.The Parenting Styles Measurement Questionnaire -PSDQ (Robinson et al., 2001) was used to operationalize four educational styles: authoritarian father, authoritarian mother, authoritative father, and authoritative mother.The sample was convenient and consisted of 291 students (Nfemale = 72.5%),aged 18 to 24 years (M = 19.19;SD = 1.37).The respondents were high school students and first and second-year students of the Faculty of Philosophy in Ni, Serbia.The collected data were statistically processed using the regression analysis procedure, and the main results are as follows.The students personality traits could explain 9.5% total variance in the authoritarian parenting style of fathers (R = .09,F5,207 = 4.36, p = .001)while significant predictors were aggressiveness ( = .26,t = 3.73, p < .001)and neuroticism ( = .17,t = 2.41, p < .017).Neuroticism was also found to be a significant predictor of the mother's authoritarian parenting style ( = .14,t = 2.09, p = .037).Gender was a significant predictor of the father's authoritative parenting style ( = .13,t = 1.97, p = .049).The results obtained are considered from the perspective of the theoretical framework of this research and the existing empirical evidence.Possible educational and other implications of the findings of this study are also outlined.