Perceived Parental Acceptance-Rejection and Psychological Adjustment: A Meta-Analysis of Cross-Cultural and Intracultural Studies

Meta-analytic procedures were used to pool information from 43 studies worldwide to test one of the major postulates of parental acceptance-rejection theory (PARTheory). Specifically, using child and adult versions of the Parental Acceptance-Rejection Questionnaire (PARQ) and the Personality Assessment Questionnaire (PAQ), these studies allowed us to assess the claim within PARTheory's personality subtheory that perceived parental acceptance-rejection is associated universally with a specific form of psychological (mal)adjustment among children and adults, regardless of differences in gender, race, geography, language, or culture. Results of the analysis showed that the predicted relation emerged without exception in all studies. The mean weighted effect sizes across the full range of sociocultural and ethnic groups studied were r = .51 for children and r = .46 for adults. Analysis of fail safe N showed that 3,433 additional studies, all with nonsignificant results, would be required to disconfirm the pancultural association between the PARQ and PAQ among children; 941 such studies would be required to disconfirm this relation among adults.