TITLE:
Mother-Daughter Conflict among 18 - 21 Years Old Adolescents: Structure, Causes and Management
AUTHORS:
Bennie Berkeley, Michelle Thomas-Mason
KEYWORDS:
Structure of Conflict, Causes and Containment
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Access Library Journal,
Vol.2 No.4,
April
30,
2015
ABSTRACT: This research examines mother-daughter conflict in freshmen/first-year
female students (18 - 21 years) enrolled at the Faculty of Social Sciences
(FSS), University of the West Indies (UWI), St. Augustine, Trinidad. The concentration
on mothers in full or part-time paid employment is reinforced by Pickhardt[1] who argued that mothers are more comfortable than fathers in family conflict.
The purpose of the study was to describe the structure of a typical
mother-daughter conflict by examining its causes and management. Using a sample
of 23 (sociology and psychology) students, 10 open-ended questions were posed.
The major questions were: Why do you get into conflict with your mother? What
or who is to blame? What is a typical conflict like? What effects does conflict
have on you? How are these conflicts resolved or managed? A phenomenological
approach was adopted. Purposive sampling was employed by recruiting only
females (18 - 21) involved in at least one family conflict in the last month
(September, 2014). First the findings indicate five (5) features of
mother-daughter conflict: Conduct (act or speech), Response, Reaction,
Intensification and Containment (CRRIC). The second is that issues of home and
school are the main sources of conflict and that at the end daughters fare less
well compared to mothers. Future research includes mother-son conflict and the
parenting adolescent/young adult children.