Optimism among High School Students: Role of Parental Attachment and Gender

The primary purpose of the present investigation is to examine the effect of parental attachment and gender on the level of optimism of high school adolescents. The study adopted a 2 (students with high parental attachment versus students with low parental attachment) × 2 (boys versus girls) factorial design. Two hundred and forty students (one hundred twenty boys and one hundred twenty girls) of 9^th and 10^th grade were purposively sampled from six different urban schools of the khurdha district of Odisha, India. They were administered the inventory of Parent attachment. The two groups of 120 boys and 120 girls were further divided into two subgroups on the basis of the median split of their scores on the parent attachment scale. The participants of all the four groups (boys with high parental attachment, boys with low parental attachment, girls with high parental attachment and girls with low parental attachment) were compared with respect to their level of optimism. The result indicated that students with high and low parental attachment did not differ significantly in optimism. Further the result also revealed that there is no gender difference in the level of optimism of adolescent students.