Understanding The Impact Of Parental Expectations On Female Self-development In Early Adulthood: A Focus Group Exploration

Parental Expectations have an important impact on their children's growth.We found that the children's own perceptions play a decisive role in the influence of Parental Expectations.The purpose of this study is to explore the children's perceived parental expectations,trying to give a voice to the people who are expected.Subjects in the study are the people in early adulthood.In this period,individuals have stable physiological status and psychological states,so they can review and reflect on their growing-up experience effectively.Compared with other periods,they also face more developmental tasks and more aspects of parental expectations.Therefore,this study combines focus group with grounded theory to explore Perceived Parental Expectations and its mechanisms,including specific contents,approaches,influences,evaluations and coping styles.The research process was divided into four sections,there are preparation,data acquisition,data analysis and validity test of results.The research samples are all the girls with the age between 18 and 30.Through organizing 3 focus groups to interviewed about Perceived Parental Expectations,each group was interviewed 2 times with 1.5 to 2.5 hours or so,the total words of the text from audio transcription about 21,7000.And then,according to the methodology of grounded theory,the study completed data analyze with the help of Nvivo12 software and extracted the research results.Finally,the study drawn conclusions:(1)Early adult female's perceived parental expectations consists of nine aspects,ranking them on the coverage in the data.They are Academic,Job,Social,Marriage,Character and Morality,Physical Psychological and Safety,Companionship,Living habits,Appearance.(2)Early adult female's perceived parental expectations are similar in the content and the way of expression,because of the common cultural background.The differences are mainly in the intensity and focus of parental expectations,they are related to parents' personal social situation and educational experience.(3)Early adult female's perceived parental expectations have an important influence on her self-expectation,self-feeling,self-cognition and self-evaluation.(4)Parents' expectations will be changed by their own experiences and children's feedback on parental expectations.(5)As the girl grows older,especially with the enhancement of family responsibility,her understanding,acceptance and recognition of parental expectations are gradually increase and the parent-child relationship also tends to be close.In addition,this study also made more attempts on focus group research in psychology.