EXPLORING FACEBOOKS RELATIONSHIP TO PARENTAL ATTACHMENT, INDEPENDENCE, AND ACADEMIC ADJUSTMENT OF COLLEGE STUDENTS

A Capstone Experience Manuscript

Presented by Kyle William Lunt

Completion Date: May 2012

Approved By:

Michael Morgan, Communication

ABSTRACT Title: Exploring Facebooks Relationship to Parental Attachment, Independence, and Academic Adjustment of College Students Author: Kyle Lunt, Communication CE Type: Course Capstone Thesis Approved By: Michael Morgan, Communication In a culture of ever-emerging social media technologies, our interpersonal interactions with those around us are in a constant state of change. It is important to monitor that change in order to analyze and understand its societal and cultural implications. This study seeks to investigate how the use of Facebook relates to a number of critical variables important to the parent-college student relationship. Existing research has explored how and by whom Facebook is used, while other studies have looked at attachment and independence in relation to collegiate adjustment; however, there remains a gap in the research, in that these variables have not been previously connected to Facebook use. This study investigates the potential role Facebook plays in supporting one end of a two-tailed hypothesis: that student-parent Facebook use correlates with healthy attachment, the promotion of individuation, and subsequently adjustment and success, OR that it correlates negatively with attachment, leading to increased dependence, suppressed individuation, and subsequently undermining adjustment. Independence, parental attachment, and ability to adjust to the collegiate academic environment are all important factors that can impact the future success of students. Findings suggest that student-parent Facebook communication correlates with attachment levels of parents and students of the same gender, and for females, is also linked to independence, proposing that Facebook may play a supporting role in completing a modified version of the first tail of the two-tailed hypothesis. While Facebook use adds to total parental communication, it does not appear to play a superior role to other media forms.

ABSTRACT Title: Exploring Facebooks Relationship to Parental Attachment, Independence, and Academic Adjustment of College Students Author: Kyle Lunt, Communication CE Type: Course Capstone Thesis Approved By: Michael Morgan, Communication In a culture of ever-emerging social media technologies, our interpersonal interactions with those around us are in a constant state of change. It is important to monitor that change in order to analyze and understand its societal and cultural implications. This study seeks to investigate how the use of Facebook relates to a number of critical variables important to the parent-college student relationship. Existing research has explored how and by whom Facebook is used, while other studies have looked at attachment and independence in relation to collegiate adjustment; however, there remains a gap in the research, in that these variables have not been previously connected to Facebook use. This study investigates the potential role Facebook plays in supporting one end of a two-tailed hypothesis: that student-parent Facebook use correlates with healthy attachment, the promotion of individuation, and subsequently adjustment and success, OR that it correlates negatively with attachment, leading to increased dependence, suppressed individuation, and subsequently undermining adjustment. Independence, parental attachment, and ability to adjust to the collegiate academic environment are all important factors that can impact the future success of students. Findings suggest that student-parent Facebook communication correlates with attachment levels of parents and students of the same gender, and for females, is also linked to independence, proposing that Facebook may play a supporting role in completing a modified version of the first tail of the two-tailed hypothesis. While Facebook use adds to total parental communication, it does not appear to play a superior role to other media forms.

INTRODUCTORY STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM & THOERETICAL FRAMEWORK: Significance of Study: In a culture of ever-emerging social media technologies such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc., our interpersonal interactions with those around us, including family, friends, acquaintances, and the rest of the public sphere, are in a constant state of change. It is important to monitor that change in order to analyze and understand its societal and cultural implications. In addition to tracking how Facebook usage has evolved in recent years with respect to students and parents, especially as Facebook continues to spread to older generations, the major goal of this study is to investigate how the use of the most pervasive form of social media in our culture relates to a number of critical variables important to the parent-college student relationship, including parental attachment, overall independence (Individuation), and adjustment to college. Thus the subjects of this study are college students. Over time, the cultural norms surrounding college have shifted. For example, in previous generations, many more students didnt graduate high school and many more high school graduates didnt go on to study at a college or university before heading straight into the work force, while today it is the expectation of many more students who graduate high school to continue their education in college by whatever means necessary. In addition, when parents shipped their children off to college in the past, it was generally more of a parting in terms of communication than it is today due to the fact that we are increasingly immersed in a culture of split-second communication technologies. Cell phones, email, instant messaging, social networking, an ever-increasing prevalence of internet connectivity, and even smartphones which connect all of these into one device, have increased the frequency and ease by which we stay in contact with people in our lives. The longer we live with these technologies, the more

normalized and universal they become, even among older generations. In fact, it is one of the hypotheses of this study that a higher percentage of college students parents will have Facebook accounts than what empirical evidence showed just a few years ago when data collected from UMass Amherst college students showed that 30% of students had a parent with a Facebook account (Connolly, 2009, p. 21). It is easier now more than ever to maintain constant communication with family and friends we arent able to spend time with in person due to physical distance and other limitations. This understandably affects the patterns of interaction between college students and their parentsperhaps in terms of quality, but at least in terms of frequency. If a student living away at college wrote a letter or called his or her parents once every few weeks by payphone or landline even a decade or two ago, that would likely be his or her only contact with them. However, today students and parents have the ability to keep up much more regularly. Therefore, if new information communication technologies such as Facebook have the ability to alter our practices of interaction and both enable and constrain social action and social relationships (Kling, Rosenbaum, & Sawyer, 2005, p. 20), then some important questions we are inclined to ask while focusing this notion on the parent-college student relationship, are: What connections can be drawn between Facebook use and parental attachment? What about Facebook use and student independence? Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, what connections can be drawn between Facebook use and academic and social adjustment? With this information we are also able to draw general connections between college students parental attachment and independence levels, subsequently analyzing how and if these potential relationships correspond to academic and social adjustment (first without Facebook in the equation). Then, the analysis will explore whether or not the overall use of Facebook by college

students, or the amount they use it to interact with their parents, plays a significant role or appears to cause certain trends in the data that represent these connections. It is plausible that Facebook is no different than other ICTs in this regard; that greater Facebook communication may create the same effects among these key variables that other forms of communication like texting or emailing do. What is unique about Facebook, however, is that unlike these other technologies, communication is done in the public eye (or at least in the eyes of everyone who can view ones Facebook profile). There is also the capability for trans-relationship communication. For example, a parent is able to view, comment, and even take part in the conversations that a student is already having, or has had in the past (since Facebook conversations arent archived or deleted like in other messaging technologies) with other Facebook friends, creating complex communication-relationship dynamics in any given exchange. Conversely, in-person conversation, telephone calls, texting, video chat, and email are all typically forms of private, one-on-one, communication. And unlike any of these other technologies, Facebook combines emails ability to conveniently send and receive messages at any time, instant messagings ability to create instant, shorter conversation back and forth, textings ability to do so on-the-go (via virtually any mobile device with internet access), and other social networking sites abilities to share pictures, videos, and personal information about oneself. While it is not possible with cross-sectional data to determine the direct level of causality when it comes to Facebooks impact on academic and social adjustment, parental attachment, or independence, relationships that are found bear significance of their own. For instance, these data may not prove that greater Facebook communication with a parent specifically leads to a higher level of attachment to that parent, or whether students who communicate heavily with their

parents via Facebook do so because of preexisting attachment the direction in this case is indeterminablehowever, based on the relationship we are able to draw important conclusions and interpretations of our own. Within the social-scientific theoretical framework of the mediasociety interaction model (p. 600) discussed by Elkind which asserts that media both reflect and determine society, we can reason that the relationship, rather than causality is what is most significant. From this perspective, causality inherently goes in both directions because of media and societys dynamic relationship, and thus a strong positive correlation between Facebook use and healthy independence, for example, could mean that Facebook both contributes to and is a result of student independence. This study is pertinent because social media is still a relatively new, and still growing, phenomenon in our culture. One of the fundamentally unique aspects of being human is our unprecedented ability to communicate amongst each other; the more we understand the effects and relationships caused by ICTs, the more we can understand ourselves and our culture. A more solid understanding of our cultures relationship to Facebook will provide a stronger base of preparedness and knowledge to adapt to future innovations in the growing realm of social media. Existing research discusses how and by whom Facebook is used, and even how college students feel about their parents using Facebook (Stern & Taylor, 2007; Connolly, 2009). In addition, other studies have looked at attachment and independence in relation to collegiate adjustment (Mattanah, Hancock, & Brand, 2004); however, there remains a gap in the research in that these variables have not been connected to Facebook use. So, as a rational next step, it is interesting to investigate how this increasingly popular form of communication relates to things our society values in the growth and development of college studentsour societys future. Independence, parental attachment, and ability to adjust to the collegiate academic and social environments are

all vital pieces of that puzzle and can impact the future success of students. This study illuminates the potential role Facebook plays in this process.

Overview of Previous Research & Introduction of Hypothesis: Secure attachment to parents has been shown to have a positive correlation with independence (less anxiety about the separation process) which correlates to better adjustment to college (Mattanah et al., 2004). Interacting more frequently with parents on Facebook, or simply having them as a Facebook friend, might indicate either healthy attachment or dependence. This opens the door for an intriguing two-tailed hypothesis: Could college student Facebook use with parents correlate with healthy attachment, the promotion of individuation, and subsequently adjustment and success? Or does it correlate negatively with healthy attachment, leading to increased dependence, suppressed individuation, and subsequently undermining adjustment and success? Results from this study such as a possible correlation between Facebook use and lack of independence may potentially be used as a springboard for further research, such as on whether the communication patterns developed and engendered by the salience of social media play any sort of role in the phenomenon of the boomerang generation of young adults who graduate college and come back home to seek further support and nurturing from their parents (Andreason, 2001, p. 11), which is commonly ascribed to socio-economic dimensions within society. Results from this research could also potentially be applied to add to the discussion of various social theories such as Demos (1994) notion that society forms the family more than a good family creates a good societyfamily is influenced from without. Or it could be used as an interesting jumping-off point in juxtaposition to Williams (2011) idea of having the family all in

the same room but not together because of all the different screens (and thus different worlds). If data from this study indicate a strong correlation between parent-student interaction via Facebook and parental attachment, an ironic, yet stable argument can be made that while ICTs can cause families to be in the same room yet not interacting with each other, they can also conversely lead to family closeness even when family members are very far away. In the same way that the daughter in the Williams article can show her mom something interesting on her screen that creates a bonding moment, if her daughter is away at college, she could just as easily post a link on her Moms Facebook wall. Using a combination of original questions and questions derived from previous questionnaires, this study measured college students demographics, parental attachment to both mother and father, independence, both social and academic college adjustment, general communication practices by frequency and type, and in particular, Facebook usage including: overall student usage, existence of parent accounts, friendship status with parents, and frequency of student-parent Facebook interaction. It is with measurements derived from this last set of variables that this study attempts to find correlations between parental attachment, independence, and academic and social adjustment in college in relation to Facebook use.

LITERATURE REVIEW: Facebook Literature: The initial possibility of research questions for this study amounted to an embarrassment of riches. Through reviewing existing literature to find a viable yet interesting research gap, and after multiple iterations and revisions, the topic of discussion was able to be simplified and broken down to a manageable form. The following is a literature review highlighting and

assessing relevant knowledge on the research topic and from which a direction of this study emerged. An article, Social Networking on Facebook, by Stern and Taylor (2007) looked at how college students use Facebook. An impressive statistic showed that from a survey of 364 undergraduates of a mid-western university, 88% of them had Facebook accounts. 62% allowed everyone in their university to access their profiles while only a small percentage of students reported limiting their profiles for privacy reasons. In addition, most students reported giving accurate representations of themselves on the site. Time spent on Facebook was limited in terms of what we think of today, with almost half (49%) spending only 10 minutes per day on the site and only 3% reporting that they spent more than two hours per day on Facebook. It is possible that this low percentage is due to the fact that Facebook use has become more prevalent and frequent since 2007, but social desirability may have played a more significant role four or five years ago when Facebook was less normalized as a routine activity. Five years ago when Facebook was newer, high daily usage may have been seen as not having a real social life whereas today it is accepted as more of an intricate and necessary aspect of having one. The researchers also found that the most common uses of Facebook were for sending messages to friends and viewing photoskeeping in touch with old friends, making plans, checking out people, checking up on their current boyfriend/girlfriend, entertainment and procrastination (Stern & Taylor, p. 13). Data for these findings were collected though a closedended set of questions with an option to add other uses that werent listed. This shows how Facebook can play a crucial role in communication among peers which can act as a good theoretical counterpoint for interaction with parents (with all the obvious caveats). The study also found that only 17% of people never accepted friend requests from people they didnt know,

demonstrating that students are willing and open to share information about themselves with strangers. Many reported accepting friend requests simply so as to not appear rude or mean. In the studys determination of Facebook conflict it was shown that 20% of users reported ever being stalked on Facebook and 86% reported that they had ever been in any trouble because of Facebook. The connotation of stalked was assumed to be negative in this study and trouble was left up to the surveyed to define. The authors describe Facebooks role in promoting relationship maintenance as well. In this sense it allows people to stay in touch and establish or at least maintain positive relationships with others. One critique of the study is that it does not raise the question of to what level these interactions and friendships are superficial. This study also describes Facebooks ability to provide a way to express ones personality and rapidly communicate with many users simultaneously without having to type out multiple email addresses, for example (p. 18). One major consideration in evaluating the Stern and Taylor study in comparison to the one at hand is that the data were collected between February and September 2006. Like all social research, it is limited to the time and place it was conducted, creating an incentive for this new study to see what is going on now and evaluate the significant changes. At the time of the previous study, Facebook was not open to everyone. It was already available to college students and became open to High School students in March 2006, but was not open to the general public until after the window of this study. Therefore, parent data were not included in any form. Since then, privacy settings have also been vastly expanded upon, revamped, and simplified. The emergence of the iPhone and other smart phones did not occur until 2007 which means Facebook applications for mobile use also are not part of the equation in this study. Since the time of this study Facebook has opened up to anyone including many corporations. Advertising has risen and

become more advanced, and due to this, the analysis of negative Facebook experiences might look a lot different than it did before, including many more complaints about unwanted invitations and spam regarding groups and events. A study done by Eszter Hargittai (2008) which included a survey of 1,060 18-19 year old college students in Illinois legitimized Facebook as the most popular social networking site (SNS) at 78.8% usage compared to MySpace which was second at 54.5%. The study also indicated that students whose parents had higher education levels were more likely to use Facebook over other sites such as MySpace and that students who lived at home rather than away at school were less likely to use social networking sites. Hispanics were the most likely to use MySpace. Since people often use SNS to maintain existing relationships, they tend to use the same SNS that the people they know already use. A 2009 study by Corrine Connolly entitled Families on Facebook: Friend or Foe? was designed to explore parent/child interactions and communication patterns on Facebook (Connolly, 2009). A 44 question, ten minute survey was distributed to three general education classes comprised of 203 respondents at UMass Amherst. One limitation to this study was that it asked the students, rather than parents themselves, about how frequent the parents Facebook use was. The question asks, How often does that parent (the one who uses it the most) use Facebook? The problem this question poses is that students might not be the most accurate judge of what parents are doing on Facebook all the timeespecially college students who spend less time with their parents directly and tend to live apart from them. There are many times where I personally go on Facebook to check on other people or see if anything exciting has happened and dont post anything. College students in the study may be unaware of how frequently their parents use Facebook or log on because they can only see the visible activity.

There is likely no way for the student to know how much the parent actually logs on. Using Facebook could be different than logging in to Facebook in many cases as well. One must also consider, however, that during the time of this study it was relatively new for parents to get on Facebook at all, so the author may have suspected students would know more about their parents usage based on their general relationships and discussions. The study also measured the number of Facebook friends students have, how often the parent/student uses Facebook, and whether or not the student had a parent on Facebook. It found that 30% of the sample did in fact have a parent on Facebook. My main critique of this study is that the author continually states findings of students who are unhappy about their parents being on Facebook. She finds that unhappiness about parents being on Facebook is correlated to blocking parents more online and communicating less with parents in general. However, there is no question in the survey directly asking about a students unhappiness with their parent on Facebook. There is only a question asking how strongly they agree or disagree (1-5) with the statement Im happy to have my parent(s) on Facebook (p. 23). Connolly then uses the reverse of this answer to measure each students Unhappiness, which data, although it has a possibility of usefulness, could also be fundamentally flawed in this context because lack of happiness about having a parent on Facebook isnt necessarily tantamount with being unhappy about it. Presumably, many who strongly disagree with the statement (which was only 20%) are unhappy about it, but some may also be simply indifferent. For instance, am I happy that Pluto is no longer a planet? No. But am I unhappy about it? Not really. Indifference might play villain to these results but its hard to say. Either way, if Connolly wanted to measure student unhappiness she might have been better off asking about it directly. This could account for why there is a high percentage of students in

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her study who are not happy about their parents Facebook presence, but who are not willing to delete their own Facebook page over it or ask their parent to delete theirsalthough those would be fairly extreme responses. There could be a certain 3rd person effect in the wording of the questions. This might explain why 41% said it was embarrassing to be friends with a parent, and 63% said it was weird to have a parent on Facebook, while only 13% said having a parent on Facebook makes them look strange. Why would people be embarrassed about it if it didnt cause them to be perceived differently or seen as strange? Connolly acknowledges that maybe uncool would be a better term than strange. It can be mustered that a very low percentage of the 63% who think its weird to have a parent on Facebook are the students who are actually Facebook friends with their parents. Varied statistics may be a result in large part of the specific wording of the questions. It is weird to have my parent(s) on Facebook allows the question to be read less personally, as though it is weird for other people, or it is weird in general. But Having a parent on Facebook makes me look strange to other users is directed more specifically toward the answerer, possibly triggering a natural reaction of self-defense. No one wants to feel like something makes them look strange. Students are more likely to say something is weird if the question doesnt imply they are talking about themselves. The study also found that there is no correlation between how many Facebook friends a student had and whether they were Facebook friends with their parents. Another thing the study measured was how frequently Facebook was used between parents and students compared to calling and emailing which are more traditional. There were questions on how often students called parents, how often parents called students, and how often students emailed parents, but

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curiously no question on how often parents emailed students. It seemed odd to include 3 out of the 4 questions. This study also provides a good benchmark to examine how much Facebook interaction between parents and students has increased. Only three years ago during this study, 30% of students had parents as Facebook friends. It is reasonable to suspect that this number has gone up significantly. In addition, in 2009, Facebook didnt compare to phone and email as primary forms of parent/student interaction. 78% of students spoke with parents on the phone at least a few times a week, 39% emailed, and only 5-6% interacted with parents on Facebook at least a few times a week. This study found that when parents do actually use Facebook, it becomes a replacement for the other forms of traditional communication. Initially, I had expected to find this result to have proliferated over time. Pre-data analysis, I also expected my study to determine that Facebook usage in 2012 would rival phone use by percentage, while possibly even surpassing email; however I still expected the phone to be the most common form of communication (which has been re-confirmed). I also suspected that Facebook inboxing had potentially replaced a large portion of emailing and expected to find that general Facebook interaction between parents and children has gone up significantly, leading to a slight decline in cell phone and email communicationthe old leaders. A 2009 study from the London School of Economics (West, Lewis, & Currie, 2009) was one of the few that had examined the idea of parents as possible Facebook friends. The study was done through a series of semi-structured interviews with 16 students in 2007 with a mean age of 22, lasting about an hour each, gathering their thoughts on having a parent as a Facebook friend. Only undergraduates known to be active Facebook users were approached (p. 619). Still, at this time, the prevalence of parents on Facebook was quite low with only one female in the group

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reporting that her mother was her Facebook friend, but the thought had at least made its way into the minds of many of these college-age users. There was an overall notion that parents would not be welcomed due to underlying reasons of social norms, embarrassment, and worries about mothers. Several thought it unlikely that their parents would even use Facebook, so the prospect of their wanting to be friends would not arise: Well, she doesnt know how to use the Internet so I know that wont happen! (Charlotte).More generally, Theres that idea that you want to keep certain things away from your parents (Luke) (p. 621). There was an overall notion in the interviews that ones public personality somehow excluded the family as part of the public, making the importance of separate worlds fundamental. However, the issue of normalization of ICTs over time that I previously described already comes into play in these interviews from 2007. This is displayed most vividly in one of the participants responses: Im not embarrassed that my mums on Facebook anymore because there seem to be a lot more parents, oldies on Facebook. But at first it was just my mum, and I was pretty embarrassed by that . . . I just knew that it was something I didnt want my mum involved in, she could look at my photos, and that sort of stuff but I didnt want her actively partaking in it. Just because thats not what mums do. (Hannah) (p. 621). An interesting aspect of these interviewees was that their private life was something that was seen as outside their family rather than inside it. Fahey (1995) has proposed that instead of one public/private boundary, it may be more accurate to speak of a more complex re-structuring in a series of zones of privacy (p. 688). Venezuela, Park, and Kee (2009) looked at Facebook and enhancement of social capital among college students by using data from a web survey taken by college students in Texas. Although positive relationships[were found] between [amount] of Facebook use and students'

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life satisfaction, social trust, civic engagement, and political participation, these relationships were not determined to be very strong and thus Facebook was not deemed a significant catalyst for creating civic duty and democracy among American youth. The study also concludes that the typical moral panic behind the idea that Facebook is harmful to young Americans can be eased.

College Student Attachment, Independence, and Adjustment Literature: According to past research (Strage & Brandt, 1999), the number of students enrolling in U.S. colleges and universities is at an unprecedented high, with new students reporting increased confidence that they will successfully graduate. In spite of this confidence, once at college, students are reporting record high levels of emotional and psychological stress (Sax, Astin, Korn, & Mahoney, 1999; U.S. Department of Education, 1995). During the 1970s and 1980s, research demonstrated that students with higher levels of separation-individuation (coded as healthy independence in my study) reported better academic and social adjustment to college and fewer symptoms of loneliness or depression (Hoffman, 1984; Hoffman & Weiss, 1987; Lapsley, Rice, & Shadid, 1989; Levine, Green, & Millon, 1986; Lopez, Campbell, & Watkins, 1986, 1988; Rice, Cole, & Lapsley, 1990). In these studies, separation-individuation was defined primarily as the absence of negative feelings about the process of separation, including feelings of anxiety, guilt, or expecting rejection when separating. Separation-individuation is seen as a developmental process that begins with separation from parents, peers, and other significant persons, but that extends to individuation and the development of a coherent, autonomous self (Mattanah et al., 2004).

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The Mattanah study about the parental attachment of college students in relation to their separation-individuation also examined three dimensions of adjustment in collegeacademic, social, and personal-emotionalto explore whether attachment and separation-individuation were equally relevant across these areas of adjustment for male and female college students (Mattanah et al., 2004). 404 college students (158 [39.1%] men and 246 [60.9%] women) at a middle-sized public regional university in the Northeastern United States participated in what was described to them as a study of college student adjustment. Data collection took place over a 3-year period and throughout the school year, from early in the fall semester to late in the spring semester. It is my understanding that the students were not followed over time, but the unusually long three year period was simply to gather more participants (it was a 90 minute survey after all). Participants were recruited via flyers placed around campus and through announcements made in undergraduate courses. Most of these announcements were made in undergraduate psychology courses, but an effort was made to recruit students in other departments as well (e.g., English, History, and Mass Communications). Interested students were individually administered a packet of questionnaires to complete, which took about 90 minutes. Upon completion, participants received a form that might be applicable for extra credit in their courses and their name was entered into a raffle for a small gift certificate at the local bookstore. To maintain confidentiality, participants signed a separate informed consent form but did not put any identifying information on the questionnaires. An unusually long 90 minute survey and a gift incentive allowed for a very comprehensive studysomething that was not a viable option, nor deemed necessary, in the development of my own survey. Of the 404 students, the mean age of the participants was 20.57 years. Using Hollingshead's (1965) two-factor index of social class, 43.7% of the students were from families

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in Social Classes I and II (i.e., executives, major professionals, and large business owners), whereas 56.3% were from families in Social Classes III and IV (minor professionals, middle management, small business owners, skilled workers, etc.; Mattanah et al., 2004). For my survey I chose to drop the complicated social class measurements due to the format of the scan-tron answer sheet. Instead the response options range from Working Class to Upper Class. Overall, I was impressed with the thoroughness of this study. It took place over a 3 year period (in which students were not followed), had a 90 minute survey, which is tough to get students to take the time for, and many demographics were taken into account including race, gender, age, and even social class. Mattanah et al. gave the students in the study a survey comprised of three different instruments that had already established credibility within the scholarly community. One, the Inventory of Parent and Peer Attachment (Armsden & Greenberg, 1987), measured student attachment levels to parents and peers with 25 questions. The second, the SeparationIndividuation Test of Adolescence (Levine, Green & Millon, 1986), contains 103 items that students responded to on a 5-point rating scale, measuring their level of separation-individuation. The third, the Student Adaptation to College Questionnaire (Baker & Siryk, 1989), is a 67-item self-report questionnaire used to assess college students' academic, social, and personalemotional adjustment to college, all of which have been shown to correlate negatively with college attrition and positively with student grade point average and participation in social events. By combining the results of the three different test batteries, Mattanah et al. were able to determine correlations among attachment, individuation, and successful adaptation to college. The study supported a growing body of evidence suggesting that both a secure attachment relationship to parents and a healthy level of separation-individuation are predictive

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of positive academic, social, and personal-emotional adjustment to college. A simplified version of these findings is illustrated in Figure 1. These results might be counter-intuitive to those who think that attachment to parents during college leads to an inability of students to live on their ownalmost as if the parents acted as a crutch and when you remove the crutch, the student would fall flat. The key factor in defeating this notion is to recognize that healthy attachment does not imply dependence; they are in fact separate variables. Instead, attachment with parents seems to reinforce factors that improve a students ability to become a successful, more independent individual at college (the positive correlations suggest that the relationships work in the other direction as well). Figure 1: Mattanah et al. Model, 2004

Attachment

Adjustment Dimensions

Separationindividuation

There are many studies on parent-child attachment/separation. Mattanah and others extend these theories to apply them to college adaptation. The current study extends the subject even further to see how a social media site like Facebook might fit into the equation since most college students now use Facebook regularly. Based on the findings of Mattanah and the other
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studies, evidence suggests that healthy, attached relationships correlate to higher separationindividuation (healthy independence), because good relationships with parents help students to be less susceptible to anxiety, guilt, or rejection, which are all defined as negative feelings about the process of separation when students go to college. Greater attachment to mothers and fathers leads to less anxiety about the separation process, and less anxiety about separation leads to greater academic, social, and personal-emotional adjustment to college (Mattanah et al., 2004, p. 221). Therefore, the study presented here pursued a connection between those findings and Facebook use. Greater Facebook use with parents might mean either healthy attachment or greater dependency and therefore, use of Facebook with parents might transitively either hinder or enhance college students healthy independence, thus impacting academic and social adjustment at college. The model shown in Figure 2 illustrates the initial hypothesis tested in this study. Figure 2: Hypothesized Model

Attachment

Communication w/ Parents on FB

Academic & Social Adjustment

Independence

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This model assumes that the pre-existing relationships among parental attachment, independence, and the social and academic dimensions of adjustment established in the Mattanah et al. (2004) study hold true. Furthermore, it hypothesizes that Facebook usage with parents also positively correlates with both parental attachment and independence, offering another dimension to these relationships. A confirmation of this model suggests that student-parent Facebook communication, due to the proposed unique nature and communication patterns of the site, somehow plays an influential role in the status of students independence and/or attachment to their mothers and fathers, therefore relating to levels of academic and social adjustment at college.

METHODOLOGY: Survey Description: This study is based on a multi-part, 45 question survey administered to college undergraduates. The survey was broken down into six basic sections: demographics, attachment to mother and father, independence, academic and social adjustment, communication patterns with parents, and Facebook related questions. There were five demographic questions in the first section, which gathered information on gender, year in school, the college/school the students major falls under, socio-economic class, and race. These items were used as introductory data to gauge to general demographic qualities of the group and to allow for the possibility of any of these factors, the most useful being gender, to act as controls for major variable correlations. Questions six through thirteen in next section measured academic and social adjustment to college. Eight questions from the original 67 of the Student Adaptation to College

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Questionnaire or SACQ (Baker et al., 1989) were chosen (and in some cases wording was slightly adjusted for clarity). Due to issues of survey length, only a select few questions were taken. The same applies for the Attachment and Adjustment sections of the survey. For ease and consistency, the original nine-point scale was changed to a Likert-Type scale ranging from 1Strongly Disagree to 5-Strongly Agree with no labels under responses 2 through 4. Five of the eight questions measure academic adjustment: two regarding motivation (e.g., I have welldefined academic goals), two regarding application (e.g., I skip a lot of classes), and one regarding performance (e.g., I struggle academically, considering the work I put in). The remaining three questions of the section focus on the social aspect of adjustment: one each regarding nostalgia (e.g., I often wish I were home instead of college), general (e.g., Im satisfied with my social life at college), and environment (e.g., I am pleased about my decision to come to UMass). Indices were created from this section to measure Academic Adjustment, Social Adjustment, and also combined to measure Overall College Adjustment. Since we are dealing with college students, these are the studys most significant dependent variables. Questions 14 through 23 make up the third section and measure student attachment to both mother and father. Of the 75 questions from the original Inventory of Parent and Peer Attachment Survey or IPPA (Armsden et al., 1987), the 25 measuring peer attachment were dropped. Of the 25 questions for each of the mother and the father, five were chosen: two regarding communication, two regarding trust, and one alienation which was reversescored. The questions chosen from the original survey were selected because they were deemed most relevant to the study at hand. Ten questions were split into five each about the mother and father. The questions for both the mother and father are identical. Response categories for these ten questions range from Almost Never or Never True to Almost Always or always true. The

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idea was taken into consideration of changing the response categories to match the Independence and Adjustment sections which use the response categories from Strongly Agree to Strongly Disagree because of suggestions for consistency, however, upon deliberation, the responses were kept as-is for this section because a Never True to Always True measurement was deemed more relevant to frequency, which is more pertinent to these questions than level of agreement. One question for each parent that read, My mother/father doesnt understand what Im going through, was reverse coded because of its negative implication, unlike the other four questions per parent. In the process a decision was made to ask about both parents separately rather than just the parent that uses Facebook the most (if at all). From the five questions on each parent, an index was created for each parent measuring healthy attachment. The fourth section, consisting of questions 24 to 31, is made up of eight questions from the original 103 of the Separation-Individuation Test of Adolescence or SITA (Levine et al., 1986). This section measures general student independence or lack of anxiety about the separation process from friends and parents. Questions were selected to create a microcosm of the full survey by selecting a relatively even array of three of the different categories of questions listed on the original. Two questions from the category of engulfment anxiety (e.g., I feel my parents restrict my freedom) and three from the category of separation anxiety (e.g., Being alone is a very scary idea for me) were chosen and were reverse-scored. Three more were chosen from the category of healthy separation (e.g., Regardless of how many friends I have, I feel I can enjoy being by myself). Three questions asked about healthy independence in regards to friends, two asked about parents, and the other three were ambiguous, for example, Being alone is a very scary idea for me. The exact wording of a few of these items was marginally adjusted from the original survey as well in order to create more useful, clearly understood questions. The

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original five-point rating scale was changed to a Likert-type scale to create answer categories more consistent with other sections. The scale ranged from Strongly Disagree to Strongly Agree with the numbers in between unlabeled because of the intuitiveness of the scale. From this section an index was created to measure general student independence. The fifth section, from questions 32 through 36, measures frequency of different kinds of parent-student communication. The questions were all asked in a similar format asking some slight variation of: In general, how often do you [type of action] with a parent via [type of communication]? The different types of communication with parents measured were phone call, text, email, video chat, and in person. The response categories for these questions were Never or Almost Never, A Few Time a Month, About Once a Week, Several Times a Week, and Almost Everyday. These items, along with question 43, asking how often students communicated with parents via Facebook, were combined to develop a total communication index. Communication pattern questions were placed toward the end of the survey, and the sixth section, 37 through 45, of Facebook-oriented questions was placed after that in order to prevent participants from going back and overthinking their answers on communication patterns while answering the other questions. It was determined that this was the best placement order of questions to get the most reliable data from the survey. Questions on Facebook determined whether the student has a Facebook account, how often they use it, whether the mother or father has a Facebook account, and if so, how often they go on Facebook, whether their parents have Facebook, whether they are Facebook friends with each parent, as well as whether they block information from parents, which method that Facebook offers for communication they use most with their parents, and the most important independent variable of this study, how often

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students communicate with parents via Facebook. For the sake of more in-depth analysis, question 43 on frequency of student-parent Facebook communication was collapsed into two categories: Low (A few times a month or less) to High (About once a week or more). Students were prompted on the survey to skip the last five questions if neither parent had a Facebook account because by that point the questions were unanswerable and irrelevant.

Survey Creation & Distribution: The UMass Amherst Spire system was used to find two large lecture classes that yielded 367 student responses. The professors were first asked about administering the surveys to their classes through in-person meetings at office hours, and permission was granted in both instances. Further communication was then followed up through email. On the same day during the middle of the Spring 2012 semester, data was collected from ECON 103, which had a total enrollment of about 200, and BIO 101, with a total enrollment of about 400. As expected, the majority of students were present, but neither class was in full attendance. Both classes were decided on in part because they were general education courses in order to yield a respectable diversity of academic majors. The surveys and accompanying scan-tron sheets were distributed to all students present at the beginning of each class and the majority of students finished them in approximately five minutes. Before, and as, surveys were being handed out, information was verbally given to the classes about the nature of the survey in addition to instructions to fill out the surveys anonymously and as completely as possible to their own discretion. Surveys were collected as students finished them and about ten minutes after the final surveys were handed out, all surveys, including incompletes, were collected in order to resume class promptly. After collection, completed surveys were brought to UMass Op-scan Services in order to render the

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raw data. Once the raw data was available in spreadsheet form, it was deposited into SPSS statistical program software for analysis. Prior to production in high quantities, the survey went through many stages of revision. A total of six pretests were done at various stages of the revision process. These six UMass students, four males and two females, were timed and asked to take the draft surveys and give any feedback, suggestions, questions, or concerns about the surveys regarding clarity or other factors. These pretests along with several rounds of suggestions from other capstone students were instrumental in coming up with the final version of the survey. Alterations were made over multiple weeks including formatting, reordering of questions and question sections (to have Facebook questions at the end for example), changing of question and instruction wording, as well as the addition and deletion of certain questions and improvement of response categories for reasons such as creating consistency across similar questions. At the conclusion of the pretests and revision meetings, surveys were revised and final versions were printed.

RESULTS & ANALYSIS Demographics The results of the surveys yielded that 40.7% of the respondents were male and 59.3% were female. In term of year in school, major, and race, a high majority of participants were freshmen (68.9%), had majors in the School of Natural Sciences or Engineering (65.2%), and were white (77%). Additionally, the highest reported socio-economic statuses were middle (49.5%) and upper-middle class (26.9%).

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Secondary Findings: Prior to investigating intricacies of my proposed hypothesis model, there were some very important secondary findings to be noted. First, 92.3% of students in this survey reported having a Facebook account compared to 88% in 2007 (Sterns & Taylor, 2007). And quite staggeringly, 73% of students had at least one parent on Facebook (See Figure 3). That is compared to just 30% of UMass students who reported having a parent on Facebook only three years ago (Connolly, 2009). This suggests that although its been around since 2004, Facebook has continued to grow within the population, especially among the older generations. This is possibly due to the fact that Facebook was first created for college students and young people, and since theyve had access to it for much longer, most students who would have a Facebook account already do, leaving less room for the same type of rapid growth that is being witnessed among parents. Additionally, now that Facebook has been around for about eight years, younger college students, around 19 years old, would have had the opportunity to use Facebook at a relatively young age in their teens, when parental supervision is usually much higher than it is when students go to college, meaning that parents might be more likely to have Facebook accounts in 2012 compared to parents who had children that were in college when Facebook began because parents of college students today are much more likely to have seen their children grow up in the house with Facebook and possibly had rules about using it or even created a personal account to monitor their children. It is also interesting to note that mothers made up the majority of parental Facebook users, with 61% of students reporting that their mother was on Facebook, and 39% of fathers. This is still double the 30% of students that reported having even one parent on Facebook in 2009 (Connolly, 2009). In fact, over half (54%) report that they are Facebook friends with their mothers while only about a third (31%) are friends with their fathers.. Three

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years ago, with only 30% of students having parents on Facebook in the first place, that would not have even been possible. Figure 3: Parents on Facebook Breakdown

Parents on Facebook %

Neither 27%

Mom Only 33%

Mom Only Dad Only Both Neither

Both 28%

Dad Only 12%

73%

of

students have at least one parent on Facebook Additionally, in 2007, 49% of Stern & Taylors 364 respondents reported using Facebook about 10 minutes per day. This study showed an incredible increase in usage in that 83% reported going on Facebook at least 1-2 times a day and more than half (52.4%) of students reported going on many time throughout the day. While the nature of Stern & Taylors version of the question is geared more towards duration of use per day, it is safe to say that going on

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Facebook 1-2 times daily, when that sometimes involves checking notifications, uploading pictures, commenting, searching, or conversing with someone else, would often entail more than 10 minutes of use, and certainly going on many times throughout the day would allow us to assume so. A large part of this phenomenon may be attributed to the addition of new features to Facebook over the years like instant messaging as well as increased use of smartphones which allow social media sites to be accessed at virtually all times just like a text message. Contrary to Connollys 2009 study and my initial expectations, this study found that Facebook does not, in fact, become a replacement for other forms of traditional communication, but rather seems to grow and shrink alongside the compounded variable of total communication, showing a particularly strong correlation between Facebooking with parents and texting with them, but showing no negative correlations among any of the different forms whatsoever. Unlike my previous prediction, this suggests that Facebook inboxing has done very little, if anything, to replace student-parent emailing. The correlation between total communication and Facebook communication (Tables 4 & 5) suggests that students who communicate more with their parents in general also tend to do so via Facebook, simply providing yet another outlet for connection. The strong correlation between texting and Facebook use (r=.28, p<.01) suggests that parents who are more up with technology are more likely to use both Facebook and texting with their children because, other than video chatting, which is much less convenient and is used much less frequently in general (because it requires a relatively fast internet connection, is not available on as many devices, and cannot easily be done on-the-go), those are the two newest communication forms that students in this study could choose from.

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Furthermore, this study showed that Facebook usage with parents in 2012 still falls very short of rivaling phone conversations, or texting, with Figure 4 illustrating that compared to phone (46%) and text (44%), only 6% of students reported communicating with their parents via Facebook several times a week or more (this percentage does not change when controlling for students with/without a parent on Facebook, mostly because students who did not have a parent on Facebook finished the survey before this question). Facebook also failed to surpass emailing, which was reported at 9%. The lower percentages of (almost) all of these forms of communication compared to the Connolly study (2009) are likely due to the slight difference in her phrasing of the response being coded which read at least a few times a week versus several times a week or more. One communication measurement the 2009 study did not include was texting between parents and students, which in this study was reported as the second most common form (44%) and was significantly higher than email (9%), which was the second most common form reported in the 2009 study. As predicted, the phone remained the most common form of communication between students and parents. The low percentage of parentstudent Facebook communication several times a week or more, compared to the other forms, indicates that even though Facebook use is still becoming more prevalent for Students, and especially parents, it is not (at this point at least) acting as a main form of communication for the two groups between each other. This may be attributed to a common notion that Facebook is mostly considered a cyberspace in which students interact with ones peers and friends rather than with coworkers or family members for example.

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Figure 4: Parent-Student Communication Breakdown Several Times a Week or More

Video Chat, 4 Facebook, 6 In Person, 7 Email, 9

Text, 44

Phone, 46

Percent of Students Who Report Using Each Form of Communication "Several Times a Week" or More

Lastly, it appears that while it was not the medium of choice, when students and parents did in fact communicate on Facebook, the most common form was through wall posts and comments (20.5%) rather than inboxing and Facebook chat (Figure 5).

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Figure 5: Types of Facebook Communication

Percent (56% Said Neither)

30 25 20 15 Percent (56% Said Neither) 10 5 0 Mostly Wall Posts & Comments Mostly Inboxing and Facebook Chat

Testing the Model Hypothesis: As I alluded to previously, the six different sections of the survey created seven key variables to look at, six of them being indices created from sets of multiple questions. These key variables for college students are: Facebook use with parents, total communication with parents, attachment to mother, attachment to father, general independence, social adjustment, and academic adjustment. Going back to Figure 2, the main research question was to investigate whether Facebook has any relationship to parental attachment or independence, and thus academic and social adjustment. However my first consideration was what to include in the definition of Facebook usage with parents. Was that just communication frequency? Did it incorporate friendship status with parents on Facebook in some way? So, the first correlations I looked at were the correlations between being Facebook friends with ones mother or father and frequency of Facebook communication with parents. As can be seen in Table 1, for both

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males and females, being Facebook friends with either ones mother or father strongly led to greater Facebook communication with parents. The reason it can be said that this led to rather than correlated to greater Facebook communication, unlike many of the two-way relationships in this study, is because (although in some cases they be able to see the main profile picture, etc.) people cannot communicate effectively on Facebook until they are accepted Facebook friends. Therefore it was determined that being Facebook friends with a parent was primarily an imbedded factor in ones Facebook communication frequencies with that parent. Due to this inherent relationship, exploration of separate models for Facebook communication with parents and Facebook friendship with parents were not necessary, and instead, all Facebook usage or Facebook communication measurements already involved the aspect of friendship. With this in consideration, further references in this study to Facebook communication are assumed to incorporate the intrinsic existence of Facebook friendship. Table 1: Correlations of Facebook Communication w/ Parents and Friendship Status, by Gender How often communicate with parent on Facebook

FB Friends with Mother

FB Friends with Father

Males Females *p<.05, **p<.01

.21* .51**

.37** .21**

After the definition of Facebook use with parents had been established, the first thing to do was test whether there were any direct correlations between Facebook communication and attachment, Facebook communication and independence, and/or Facebook communication and adjustment factors. The hypothesized model suggested that Facebook communication would

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correlate to attachment AND to independence. The next step of the hypothesis was that both of those factors would then correlate to both forms of adjustment. However, it was desirable to first test for direct correlations between Facebook communication and the three main variables because of the possibility that Facebook would correlate directly with adjustment, showing a significant and direct relationship regardless of attachment or independence. Additionally, to fulfill the hypothesized model, student-parent Facebook use would, at the least, need to correlate with attachment and/or independence, and a test for direct correlations to the main variables would prove as a good starting point. The results showed no significant correlations between student Facebook use and Independence or either form of adjustment. There did appear to be a correlation between Facebook use and parental attachment, however upon controlling for sex, it was discovered that these correlations were gendered in that higher Facebook use with parents by males correlated to higher attachment to fathers, while higher Facebook use with parents by females correlated to higher attachment to mothers (Figure 6, Tables 4 & 5).

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Figure 6: Discovering Direct Correlations

Attachment

Communication w/ Parents on FB

Independence

Academic & Social Adjustment

The gendered results of this study in terms of both students and parents so far suggested that the overall model wouldnt apply to parents generally, but to mothers for females and fathers for males. A slightly more complex version of the initial hypothesis model would be needed. Since Facebook communication was found to correlate to parental attachment for students and parents of the same gender, it was then necessary to test, with the new parameters of gender, whether these attachments would go with higher levels of independence or adjustment. Going back to Figure 1 of the Mattanah et al. study (2004), there is a premise that three basic relationships exist: 1. Attachment correlates to independence. 2. Independence correlates to overall adjustment to college (including social and academic) 3. Attachment correlates to overall academic adjustment to college

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Therefore, the next logical step was to test these relationships in regards to the new survey data with gender differences factored in.

Female Analysis Results varied, showing that for females, attachment to both mothers and fathers correlated significantly with general independence (Figure 7, Table 2). Subsequently, it was found that independence strongly correlated to both social and academic adjustment for females. Both of these findings support the Mattanah et al. (2004) study. Additionally, attachment to mothers and/or fathers strongly correlated to academic adjustment of college females, while attachment to mothers in particular, also correlated with social adjustment. Aside from the lack of connection between attachment to father and social adjustment, the findings of the Mattanah et al. (2004) study sturdily hold up for females (Table 2). Since Facebook has been shown to correlate with attachment to mothers, it can be determined that the main hypothesisthat Facebook would lead to higher parental attachment levels, subsequently correlating to college adjustment and independenceholds true for college females with their mothers. This continuum can be followed by the bold arrows in Figure 7.

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Figure 7: Model for Females

.01 .20* Attachment to

-.05
Communication with Parents on FB .19* .07

Academic Father .24* .32* Independence .28* .34* Attachment to Mother .30* .16* Social Adjustment Adjustment

.00 *p<.05 Attachment to Father and Social Adjustment: r = .11, n.s. Attachment to Mother and Academic Adjustment: r = .35*, p<.05

Table 2: Dependent Variable Correlations for Females Attachment to Father Attachment to Father Attachment to Mother Independence Social Adjustment Academic Adjustment *p<.05 Male Analysis For males, some of the relationships appeared to be quite different. Most notably was the lack of a significant relationship between attachment to either parent and independence, possibly suggesting that there is something inherent about a females development of independence that is more reliant on her relationships with her parents than a males (at r=.12, the relationship --.30* .24* .11 .20* Attachment to Mother .30* --.30* .16* .35* Independence .24* .30* --.34* .32* Social Adjustment .11 .16* .34* --.28* Academic Adjustment .20* .35* .32* .28* ---

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between male attachment to father and independence is likely close to significance, but the relationship between male attachment to mother and independence, r=.10, is even lower, while the r value for females is more than double what it is for males with either parent). The lack of a significant relationship between male parental attachment and independence is contrary to the basic model proposed by Mattanah et al. (2004), creating a major disconnect in the hypothesized model of Facebook and adjustment. Still, it remains significant that for males, Facebook communication with parents correlates to attachment to father, which correlates to academic adjustment, allowing for another indirect, yet important connection to be made. As for females, attachment to either mother or father correlates to higher academic adjustment for males. However, the full continuum is not completed with males and their mothers because, as with females, there is no correlation between Facebook use with parents and attachment to the parent of opposite sex. Additionally, there is no connection between academic adjustment and social adjustment for males, meaning there is no connection (not even indirect) between male Facebook usage with parents and social adjustment based on the variables at hand.

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Figure 8: Model for Males

-.06
.17* Attachment to Academic .12* Father .12 .22* Communication with Parents on FB .05 Attachment to Mother .10 -.02 Social Adjustment -.03 Independence .13 .18* Adjustment

-.01 *p<.05 Attachment to Father and Social Adjustment: r = -.05, n.s. Attachment to Mother and Academic Adjustment: r = .18*, p<.05

Table 3: Dependent Variable Correlations for Males Attachment to Father Attachment to Father Attachment to Mother Independence Social Adjustment Academic Adjustment *p<.05 --.36* .12 -.05 .17* Attachment to Mother .36* --.10 -.02 .18* Independence .12 .10 --.18* .22* Social Adjustment -.05 -.02 .18* --.13 Academic Adjustment .17* .18* .22* .13 ---

Facebook in Relation to Other forms of Communication One of the most important questions to answer, in light of Facebooks status as a medium of unique communication capabilities, is whether it is truly set apart from other forms of communication in terms of its effects on attachment, independence, and adjustment. Therefore, I
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took the correlations shown by Facebook use with parents and compared them to other forms of parental communication. One of the connections that had been established previously for females was that Facebook communication with parents correlated to higher attachment levels with their mothers. However, upon testing the other forms of communication, it appeared that all the other forms of communication on the survey besides In person communication (phone, text, email, and video chat) also correlated with higher attachment levels to mothers (Table 4). Phone communication for females was the only medium that proved to correlate with attachment to both parents. Additionally for females, texting and emailing with parents showed direct correlations to higher independence while phone conversations showed a direct correlation to academic adjustment, links that are absent in the Facebook correlations. One of the major results for males was that Facebook use with parents correlated to higher attachment to fathers. However, texting and emailing with parents were also shown to correlate with attachment to fathers, while unlike Facebook use, phone conversations, texting, emailing, and video chatting for males correlated with attachment to mothers. Video chatting with parents also revealed a direct correlation to academic adjustment for males, which Facebook use did not (Table 5). It was hard to make out why exactly some forms of communication with parents relate to attachment, independence, and adjustment levels while others dont. However, one important point to take from this was that Facebook was not alone in its ability to correlate with attachment to parents for either males or females. This suggests that despite Facebooks relatively unique and certainly more versatile interface, it does not act as a supreme medium for increasing attachment to parents, independence, or social/academic adjustment compared to other media.

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However, it is pertinent to recognize that all forms of communication with parents for males or females in this study correlated very strongly with total communication (Tables 4 & 5) which was an index created by taking the mean score of every communication medium in the survey (FB, phone, text, email, video chat, in-person). What is significant about this is that total communication was shown to create stronger correlations to attachment, independence, and adjustment than Facebook or any other medium across the board. For females, the correlation between total communication and attachment to mother had more than double the strength of the already significant relationship between Facebook communication with parents and attachment to mother. Additionally, total communication with parents was shown to correlate with both independence and academic adjustment for females. In males, total communication with parents was linked to a stronger level of attachment to fathers than Facebook communication (or any other form) alone, and it also showed a strong correlation with attachment to mother (Table 5). Because individual forms of parent-student communication all appear to create a strong funnel effect into total communication, it suggests that in order to increase the chances for an environment of better attachment to parents for male and female students, and better independence and academic adjustment for females in particular, it is more about increasing ones overall communication with parents, and less about which medium it is done through. Greater total communication between students and parent appears to facilitate positive results, and Facebook use adds to this total value, allowing it to take on a complementary role. This both weakens and strengthens the hypothesis, because while Facebook is not unique from other forms of parental communication in its ability to impact attachment levels, it still plays a supportive part in and adds to total communication, which exhibits even stronger correlations to

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attachment, independence, and adjustment than any single form of communication on its own (Figures 9 & 10, Tables 4 & 5). Figure 9: Female Correlations to Total Communication
.17* .20* Attachment Academic .13 to Father .24* .32* Adjustment

Facebook use with Parents

.51*

.19* Total Communication with Parents .45*

Independence .19* .34* Attachment to Mother .30* .16* Social Adjustment .28*

-.05 *p<.05 Attachment to Father and Social Adjustment: r = .11, n.s. Attachment to Mother and Academic Adjustment: r = .35*, p<.05

Figure 10: Male Correlations to Total Communication

.11 .17* Attachment Academic .30* to Father .10 .12 .22* Adjustment

Facebook use with Parents

.45*

Total .10 Communication with Parents .32*

Independence .13 .18* .10 -.02 Social Adjustment

Attachment to Mother

.08 *p<.05 Attachment to Father and Social Adjustment: r = -.05, n.s. Attachment to Mother and Academic Adjustment: r = .18*, p<.05

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Table 4: Major Correlations for Females Total Attachment Attachment Academic Social Independence Comm to Father to Mother Adjustment Adjustment -.05 .07 .01 .00 .51* .20* .60* .72* .49* .32* .28* --.27* .05 .01 .06 -.07 .13 .35* .37* .23* .16* -.01 .45* .13 .14* .17* .04 .00 .19* .23* .05 .10 .03 .06 .17* .00 .04 -.02 -.05 -.14 -.05

Communication Medium with Parents

FB Phone Call Text Email Video Chat In person Total Communication *p<.05

Table 5: Major Correlations for Males Total Attachment Attachment Academic Social Independence Comm to Father to Mother Adjustment Adjustment .05 -.03 -.06 -.01 .45* .20* .65* .69* .51* .54* .32* --.14 .22* .22* .11 .04 .30* .29* .27* .19* .26* -.08 .32* -.05 .12 .13 -.01 .08 .10 .12 .01 .08 .19* .02 .11 -.01 .11 .13 .13 -.05 .08

Communication Medium with Parents

FB Phone Call Text Email Video Chat In person Total Communication *p<.05

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CONCLUSION: Findings: Findings showed that student-parent Facebook communication correlated with higher attachment levels to parents of the same gender as the student, while direct relationships did not exist between student-parent Facebook use and independence, academic adjustment, or social adjustment (Figure 6). However, for females, because attachment to either parent correlates with higher independence and academic adjustment, independence correlates with both academic and social adjustment, and maternal attachment also correlates with better social adjustment, a chainof-relationships model, like the one shown in Figure 7 can be supported to show how greater Facebook communication with parents plays a direct role in creating greater maternal attachment, and a positive yet indirect role in creating healthy independence and better academic and social adjustment to college. Similarly for males, because Facebook communication was shown to have a direct correlation with paternal attachment, and parental attachment correlates with academic adjustment, Facebook use with parents may also play a positive and indirect role between those variables (Figure 8). In addition, Facebook use with parents, like other ICTs measured in the study, did show a significant connection to a students total communication level with parents, which was linked to maternal attachment, independence, and academic adjustment for females, as well as attachment to both parents for males. These trends suggest that Facebook use with parents plays a supporting role for college students in reaching healthier parental attachment levels, greater independence, and consequently greater academic adjustment, supporting a slightly modified version of the first thread of the original two-tailed hypothesis (Figure 2). As can be seen from

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the diagrams in Figures 7-10, more of the hypothesized connections hold true for females than males both when total communication is factored into the equation (which has been shown to strengthen connections) and when it is not. Because parental attachment appears to be inherently more important for independence, academic and social adjustment for females (Tables 2 & 3), and Facebook communication shows both direct and indirect relationships to parental attachment (Figures 7-10), it can be determined based on the data in this study that increased levels of all forms of parental communication for students, not excluding Facebook, are more critical for female students than males. The major goal of this study was to investigate how the use of the most pervasive form of social media in our culture relates to a handful of critical variables important to the parentcollege student relationship including: parental attachment, overall independence (Individuation), and social/academic adjustment to college. Based on the results, it has been determined that Facebook use is relevant due to its direct, gendered correlations with parental attachment levels, as well as its relationship to increased overall communication with parents, which is subsequently related to increased levels of independence and adjustment for female college students.

Limitations: One of the obvious limitations in virtually any undergraduate capstone study is lack of funding. A known lack of funding at the outset of this study subsequently led to the brainstorming and creation of methods that would of course require little to no funds in order to collect as much reliable data as possible. An increased timeframe for data collection and availability of funds to do so would have allowed for greater options, for example, the capability

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to travel to more classes and even multiple universities to gain more diversity and quantity of respondents while broadening the results of the study. A challenging part of any original study is working with and trying to make the most of the (possibly limited) resources at hand. In addition, while I was satisfied with the high rate of freshmen respondents in the study based on the notion that as new college students, they are very immersed in this phenomenon of adjustment, in a more ideal situation the study would have potentially included more upperclassmen in the interest of creating a more diverse sample among grade levels and possibly measuring differences among them. This might also be considered a limitation to this study. Another potential limitation in this research and its findings is the inherent issue of causality. While one can deduce an educated analysis of the importance and direction of the correlations found, such as Facebooks link to parental attachment, the nature of these correlations are that the true causal directions of their relationships are indeterminable. Although the argument can be made that the existence of a relationship alone is sufficient. That is to say, while we can reason that the relationship, rather than causality is what is most significant, and that causality almost always goes in both directions because of the dynamic and reciprocal relationship between media and society (Elkind, 1993), it is still not possible in this study to determine whether Facebook is the direct cause of heightened parental attachment for instance. At most it is likely an important contributing factor. The issue of causality, for better or worse, allows for a certain level of interpretation by the researcher, and the results of any study should be taken with a grain of salt and filtered through the intellectual lens of optimistic skepticism.

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Implications for Future Research & Further Discussion: The irony of new studies like this is that a scholar spends a considerable amount of time exploring and examining the work that has been done in a given field or on a given subject by others in the academic world in order to discover a gap in the research, of course with the intention of filling that gap and contributing his or her bit to societys collective intelligence. However, in the attempt to fill that gap, so many more questions are raised and thus so many more gaps are created and exposed. This study focused on Facebook use with parents, but as some of the analysis describes, many other media forms of student-parent communication were considered for the sake of comparison. An option for future research would be to take one or each of those forms of student-parent communication and look at it more closely, perhaps taking a more in-depth look at how video chatting or texting relate to college adjustment, further illuminating the differences between how these media work within the student-parent, or even within other sorts of, relationships. This study interestingly relates to Williams (2011) idea that the advancement of ICTs has led to more worlds created out of the multiple realities portrayed within all the screens that people interact with on a regular basis, distracting them from the real relationships and physical world around them. While this may be the case for many family members inside the home, the study at hand shows that in a state of separation, like a student living away at college, those same screens and ICTs may bring peoples separate worlds into one (briefly at least) enhancing attachment, and having a reverse effect. At least in terms of Andreasons (2001) discussion of the boomerang effect, it would appear from this study that Facebook usage with parents does not have any palpable impact on

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students returning home after college. Only positive correlations, where there were any at all, were found between ICT communication with parents and independence levels, suggesting that, if lack of independence played any part in this phenomenon (other than financial reasons, etc.), communicating with parents via Facebook while away at college would not contribute to it. This study could also provide a stepping stone for a more qualitative approach in which the student-parent relationships in conjunction with communication technologies are observed through more personal interviews. While tools for statistical analysis like SPSS can discover significant relationships within the data, trying to objectify and nail down the subjectivity of human interaction can be rather tricky, which would be an excellent reason to get more descriptive accounts from students and parents about how they feel Facebook interaction affects their relationships and whether it has any influence on adjusting to different aspects of college. This approach would do more than just illuminating the relationships that exist between variables, but also indulge the question of why. Besides searching for connections to the student-parent relationship and college adjustment, I also wanted to look at Facebook in 2012 just to see how some basic trends, like usage, had been affected over a couple years due to the rapid environment of change that social media operates in. It is important to note that even since my research for this study began, Facebook has changed its main format to a timeline structure and added easier controls for grouping family, acquaintances, close friends, coworkers, etc. This indulges Faheys (1995, p. 688) idea that rather than one boundary between private and public, there are a complex series of different zones of privacy. As Facebook and other social media evolve, it will be interesting to see how they deal with and address (or dont address) these different zones. The point is that as long as Facebook remains an influential media outlet and as long as its rules of operation,

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inclusion and exclusion continue to change, it will impact human interaction and remain a pertinent issue for continued study regarding the role it plays within society. As more and more generations are exposed to this medium (when I am a parent or grandparentassuming that its even still aroundI will certainly be more oriented to social media than my parents and grandparents are now), analysis of Facebook usage, along with other ICT usage, will become relevant to more and more different kinds of relationships ranging from friendships, to romantic relationships, to cross-generational relationships, and more. Gaps for further research will always be created faster than they can be filled or updated.

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Works Cited:

Andreason, M.S. (2001). Evolution in the familys use of television: An overview. In J. Bryant & A.J. Bryant (Eds.), Television and the American Family (2nd ed., pp. 3-32). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Armsden, G. C., and Greenberg, M. T. (1987). The Inventory of Parent and Peer Attachment: Relationships to well-being in adolescence. Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 16(5), 427-454. Baker, R. & Siryk, B. (1989). The Student Adaptation to College Questionnaire (SACQ). Los Angeles, California: Western Psychological Services, 1989. http://portal.wpspublish.com/pdf/sacq.pdf Connolly, C. (2009). Families on Facebook: Friend or Foe? Unpublished B.A. Thesis. University of Massachusetts Amherst. Demos, J. (1974). The American family in past time. The American Scholar, 43(3), 422-446. Elkind, D. (1993). Adolescents, parenting, and the media in the Twenty-first Century. Adolescent Medicine: State of the Art Reviews, 4(3), 599-606. Fahey, T. (1995). Privacy and the family. Sociology, 29, 687-703. Hargittai, E. (2007). Whose space? Differences among users and non-users of social network sites. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 13, 276-297. Hoffman, J. A. (1984). Psychological separation of late adolescents from their parents. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 31, 170178. Hoffman, J. A., & Weiss, B. (1987). Family dynamics and presenting problems in college students. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 34, 157163. Kling, R., Rosenbaum, H. & Sawyer, S. (2005) "CH.2 "The Consequences of ICTs for Organizations and Social Life."" Understanding and Communicating Social Informatics: a Framework for Studying and Teaching the Human Contexts of Information and Communication Technologies. Medford, NJ: Information Today, 2005. 13-31. SPARK. Web. 27 Sept. 2011. http://perso.limsi.fr/Individu/turner/Master2005_UMLV/SI_KlingReport.pdf Lapsley, D., Rice, K. G., & Shadid, G. E. (1989). Psychological separation and adjustment to college. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 36, 286294. Levine, J. B., Green, C. J., & Millon, T. (1986). The separation-individuation test of adolescence. Journal of Personality Assessment, 50, 123137.
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Lopez, F. G., Campbell, V., & Watkins, C. E. (1986). Depression, psychological separation, and college adjustment: An investigation for sex differences. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 33, 5256. Lopez, F. G., Campbell, V., & Watkins, C. E. (1988). Family structure, psychological separation, and college adjustment: A canonical analysis and cross-validation. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 35, 402409. Mattanah, J. F., Hancock, G. R., & Brand, B. L. (2004). Parental attachment, separationindividuation, and college student adjustment: A structural equation analysis of mediational effects. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 51(2), 213-225. doi:10.1037/0022-0167.51.2.213 Rice, K. G., Cole, D., & Lapsley, D. (1990). Separation-individuation, family cohesion, and adjustment to college: Measurement validation and test of a theoretical model. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 37, 195202. Sax, L., Astin, A., Korn, W., & Mahoney, K. (1999). The American freshman: National norms for 1999. Los Angeles: Higher Education Research Institute, University of California. Stern, L., & Taylor, K. (2007). Social networking on Facebook. Journal of the Communication, Speech & Theatre Association of North Dakota, 20, 9-20. Strage, A., & Brandt, T. (1999). Authoritative parenting and college students' academic adjustment and success. Journal of Educational Psychology, 91, 146156. U. S. Department of Education, & National Center for Education Statistics. (1995). STATISTICAL ANALYSIS REPORT, JUNE 1995: NATIONAL EDUCATIONAL LONGITUDINAL STUDY OF 1988; TRENDS AMONG HIGH SCHOOL SENIORS, 19721992 (Publication No. NCES 95-380). Washington, DC: U. S. Government Printing Office. Valenzuela, S., Park, N. & Kee, K. F. (2009), Is there social capital in a social network site?: Facebook use and college students' life satisfaction, trust, and participation. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 14, 875901. doi: 10.1111/j.10836101.2009.01474.x West, A., Lewis, J. & Currie, P. (2009). Students' Facebook friends: Public and private spheres. Journal of Youth Studies, 615-627. Retrieved from http://people.uncw.edu/hakanr/documents/areparentswelcomeonfb.pdf Williams, A. (2011, April 29). Quality time, redefined. The New York Times, Sunday Styles, pp. 1, 12.

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STUDENT SURVEY:

Dear Student: This is a brief anonymous survey. Please do not include your name anywhere on the questionnaire or answer sheet. Its purpose is to generate data for a senior thesis in Communication. You may skip any questions you do not wish to answer. Please answer the questions truthfully and to the best of your ability by filling in the corresponding circles on the answer sheet. Thank you very much!

1) What is your gender? a) Male b) Female c) Other 2) What year are you? a) Freshman b) Sophomore c) Junior d) Senior e) Non-Undergraduate 3) Which School/College does your major fall under? a) Social and Behavioral Sciences b) Natural Sciences or Engineering c) Management d) Humanities and Fine arts e) Other/ Undecided 4) How would you classify your familys socio-economic status? a) Working class b) Lower-Middle Class c) Middle Class d) Upper-Middle Class e) Upper Class 5) How would you classify your race? a) Latino b) White 50

c) Black d) Asian e) Other Please say how much you agree or disagree with these statements, using the following scale:
1 -----------Strongly Disagree 2 ------------3 ------------4 -------------5 Strongly Agree

6) I have well-defined academic goals 7) I often doubt the value of a college degree 8) I skip a lot of classes 9) I always keep up-to-date with academic work and homework 10) I struggle academically, considering the effort I put in 11) Im satisfied with my social life at college 12) I often wish I were at home instead of at college 13) I am pleased about my decision to come to UMass

The next set of questions concerns feelings about parents. Please select the answer that most applies to you, using this scale:
1 -------------2 --------------3 --------------4 Often True ---------------5

Almost Never Or Never True

Not Very Often True

Sometimes True

Almost Always or Always True

14) I like to get my mothers point of view on things Im concerned about. 15) I tell my mother about my problems and troubles. 16) My mother doesnt understand what Im going through 17) My mother trusts my judgment 18) I feel my mother does a good job as a mother 19) I like to get my fathers point of view on things Im concerned about. 20) I tell my father about my problems and troubles. 21) My father doesnt understand what Im going through 22) My father trusts my judgment

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23) I feel my father does a good job as a father

Now, here are some statements that describe various feelings that people have. Please say how much you agree or disagree with each one, and mark your answer on the answer sheet using this scale:
1 -----------Strongly Disagree 2 ------------3 ------------4 -------------5 Strongly Agree

24) I feel my parents restrict my freedom 25) I frequently worry about being rejected by my friends 26) Sometimes my parents are so overprotective I feel smothered

27) Being alone is a very scary idea for me. 28) Before going to bed at night, I feel lonely and wish there were someone around to talk to or just be with. 29) Regardless of how many friends I have, I feel I can enjoy being by myself

30) Although my best friend does things I do not like, I still care about him/her a great deal.

31) I am friendly with several different types of people

Please answer the following questions in terms of your communication with your parents during the semester when you are here at UMass with the following scale:
1 -------------2 --------------3 --------------4 ---------------5

Never Or Almost Never

A Few Times a Month

About Once a Week

Several Times a Week

Almost Everyday

32) In general, how often do you speak with a parent on the phone? 33) In general, how often do you and your parents text each other? 34) In general, how often do you and your parents email each other?

35) In general, how often do you communicate with a parent via video chat? 36) In general, how often do you see a parent in person?

37) Do you have a Facebook Account? a) Yes

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b) No

38) If so, how often do you go on Facebook on average? a) Less than once a week b) About once a week c) Multiple times per week d) 1-2 times daily e) Many times throughout the day 39) Does your mother have a Facebook account? a) Yes b) No c) I dont know 40) Does your father have a Facebook account? a) Yes b) No c) I dont know

*If neither of your parents has a Facebook account, you are finished Thank you very much!*
41) Are you friends with your mother on Facebook? a) Yes b) No c) She doesnt have an account 42) Are you friends with your father on Facebook? a) Yes b) No c) He doesnt have an account 43) In general, how often do you communicate with a parent on Facebook? a) Never or almost never b) A few times a month c) About once a week d) Several times a week e) Almost everyday 44) How do you most often communicate with your parents on Facebook? a) Mostly Wall Posts & Comments b) Mostly Inbox Messaging & Facebook Chat c) Both equally d) Other e) Neither one 45) Do you block any of your Facebook information from your parents? a) Yes b) No c) Not applicable Thank you for participating in the survey! Please make sure all of your answers are filled in on the answer sheet.

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