The examination of parents' perfectionism and parental self-efficacy beliefs according to social media usage and other variables

The aim of this research is to examine the relationship of parents'perfectionism and parental self-efficacy with social media usage and other demographic variables. The research was carried out with the volunteer parents living in Turkey who have at least a child in "0-6 age" group. The study group of this research consists of 410 parents, 324 mother and 86 father, whom were selected by convenience sampling method. Informed Consent Form, Demographic Information Form, Berkeley Parenting Self-Efficacy Scale Revised (BPSE-R) and Frost Multidimensional Perfectionism Scale (FMPS) were applied to the participants. IBM SPSS Statistics 22 programme was used in the analysis of the data.The Mann Whitney U test, which is the non parametric version of the T-test, was used to examine whether the self-efficacy and perfectionism levels of parents differ according to their parental status, since the distribution of "parental self-efficacy" scores, which is the dependent variable of the study, is not suitable to normal distribution. The Kruskal Wallis test, which is the non parametric equivalent of one- way analysis of variance, was used to examine whether the self-efficacy levels of parents differ according to the parents' age, number of children, education level, monthly income, social media usage and the level of getting influenced by social media. The relationship betweeen parental self-efficacy and perfectionism was calculated by Spearman's correlation. It has been detected that there is a negative correlation between parental self-efficacy and three sub-dimensions of perfectionism (rho=-,143, p<,001). As the level of parental self-efficacy increases, the level of perfectionism decreases. It has been determined that there is a statistically meaningful difference between parental self-efficacy and social media usage (U=1231.5, p<,008). The parents using social media 4 hours a day have less parental self-efficacy levels than the other parents. It has been seen that there is a statistically meaningful difference between parental self-efficacy and the level of getting ınfluenced by social media (U=774,5, p<,005). The parents who perceive social media as inefficient in parenting roles have higher self-efficacy levels than the other parents. There have not been found any significant meaningful differences between the demographic variables and parental self-efficacy. There have been found meaningful differences between perfectionism and social media usage, the level of getting influenced by social media, the level of education and monthly income. The findings have been discussed and compared with the other findings in the literature.