In this paper we discuss the relationships between the social attitudes of students aged 13 to 18 and their parents, important agents in their socialization. We use Japanese family data from the 1990' s and American family data from the 1970's to compare basic features of the two societies.
Using data from the triad of mother, father and child, we focus on three social attitudes : authoritarian-conservatism, idea-conformity and self-confidence. We hypothesize that the factor structures of parents' and children' s attitudes are similar. With the LISREL program we use linear structual equation modeling to test our hypothesis and to measure the correlations among different family members' attitudes.
We find different patterns of correlation among family triads in the U.S. and Japan.First, for authoritarian-conservatism the correlation among family members is positive in both countries, although all of the correlations are higher in the U.S. than Japan. Second, the only significant correlation in Japan for idea comformity is between parents, whereas in the U.S. the only significant correlation is between mother and child. Third, for self-confidence all of the correlations among the family triad are significant and positive in the U.S.sample; however, although all are positive in Japan, only the correlation between father and mother is significant.
All in all, though American data supports standard sociological theories of family, for example, Parson' s theory of functions of family, Japanese data does not. This is because in the U.S. society parents' social attitudes are transmitted to their children effectively. In addition, weak correlation in Japan between mothers and children does not support the importance of “mother-child identification” in Japanese sociological family theory.