Abstract:

The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship between university students’ perceived parental attitudes, levels of forgiveness and whether forgiveness levels vary by gender. This descriptive study was conducted using the relational screening model. The population of the study was the university students at İnönü University. Its participants were 389 university students, 278 females and 111 males. In the study, easy-to-reach sampling was used as a sampling method in order to provide practicality and speed to the study.The data were collected using a personal information form, the Parental Attitude Scale and the Heartland Forgiveness Scale. Since the data of the study were not normally distributed, the Spearman-Brown order differentiation correlation test was used to determine the relationships between the university students’ perceived parental attitudes (democratic, authoritarian and protective-demanding) and the students’ forgiveness tendencies (general, forgiving themselves, forgiving others and forgiving situations). The Mann Whitney-U test was used to determine whether forgiveness scores varied by gender. Based on these findings no statistically significant relationship between parental attitudes and forgiving others was found in this study. The participants whose perceived parental attitude was democratic had higher tendencies to forgive themselves and situations. However, the participants who perceived their parents as protective-demanding or authoritarian had lower levels of general forgiveness, forgiving themselves and situations. This study found that the forgiveness tendencies of university students did not differ significantly by gender. 

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