The relationship between perception of university students attitudes of parents with automatic thought and style of coping stress

The main purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between perceived parental attitudes of the university students, their automatic thoughts and their strategies of dealing with stress. The sample of the study consists of 150 current university students, which were randomly selected from the universities in Istanbul. The personal data of participants were collected thorough the "Informed Consent Form" and "Demographic Information Form" which were developed by the researcher. Also ''Parental Attitude Questionnaire'', ''Automatic Thoughts Questionnaire'' and ''Ways of Stress Coping Questionnaire'' were used as a tool to get the information from the subjects for further indication. The data obtained from the subjects, have been evaluated by the statistical program SPSS 22.0 (R). During the evaluation of the research; in addition to the descriptive statistical methods, Kolmogorov - Smirnov test was used to check the normal distribution. In case of two groups comparison of quantitative data; Mann Whitney U test was used and in the case of more than two group's comparison, Kruskal Wallis test was used. While Man Whitney U test was used to determine the difference between groups, Spearman Correlation Analysis was applied for the examination of the relationship between scales. According to the results obtained from the research, there is a negative relationship between the democratic parental attitude perceived by the students and the automatic thought levels of the students. To clarify, while the intensity of democratic attitudes increase, automatic thought levels decrease. However, there is a positive relationship between protective and authoritative attitude of parents and automatic thought levels of students. According to the data obtained, when the positivity of attitudes shown by parents' increase, automatic thought levels of students also increase. In addition, there is a positive relationship between democratic parental attitude and problem-oriented stress coping styles, and a negative relationship with the subscale of desperate approach. Moreover, there is a negative correlation between the protective-willing parental attitude and the subscale of seeking social support, and a positive correlation between the helpless parental attitude and the subscale of submissive attitude. Furthermore, authoritarian parental attitude affects problem-oriented coping styles in the negative direction and it increases the level of desperate and submissive approach sub-dimensions. Finally, findings obtained in the research were discussed in the light of literature and suggestions were made related to these results.