Who's a Good Kid? Perceived Parenting Practices & Altruism

Authors

• Brianna Guinigundo, University of Central FloridaFollow
• Aajonna St.John, University of Central FloridaFollow
• Katherine Pospichal, University of Central FloridaFollow
• Sebastian Gonzalez, University of Central FloridaFollow

Streaming Media

Files

Course Code

PSY

Course Number

4215C

Faculty/Instructor

Dr. William Volante

Faculty/Instructor Email

william.volante@ucf.edu

About the Author

We are undergraduate students majoring in psychology who collaborated together for our group project as part of our PSY 4215C: Advanced Research Methods in Psychology course. Thank you very much to our course’s professor, Dr. William Volante, for all his generous guidance and support throughout the entirety of this research project. We are also grateful to Sadie Lisi for her contributions to this research.

Abstract, Summary, or Creative Statement

This semester-long research project was for our HIP Research-Intensive course, PSY 4215C: Advanced Research Methods in Psychology with Dr. William Volante. Throughout this course, we learned how to do various statistical analyses and how to interpret the findings. We put our learnings from the classroom into real-life practice as we learned how to conduct an original research study. The purpose of this research was to evaluate the correlation, if any, between perceived parenting styles and altruism scores among UCF students. Our independent variable means how an individual believes their relationship with their parent to be, classified as one of the following four parenting styles depending on parental control and responsiveness: negligent, permissive, authoritarian, and authoritative. Altruism means the frequency of behaviors one performs to help others. We hypothesized that the authoritative parenting group would have the highest levels of altruism, followed by permissive, authoritarian, and neglectful. Our methodology included an online Qualtrics survey featuring the Parenting Style Scale and The Self-Report Altruism Scale. Survey results were analyzed using a correlation coefficient and an ANOVA. Our results reveal no significant difference between perceived parenting styles and altruism scores, but there was a significant positive relationship between parental control and altruism scores. The implications for this study include supporting family therapy practices and improving one’s home life, fostering a helping community overall. We learned how to write this research into a full-length APA paper and to disseminate our research to the general public by creating a research poster and this video presentation.

Keywords

altruism; parenting; relationship; parenting style; survey; Qualtrics; research; correlation; helping; family; community; statistics; psychology; research methods; social; interpersonal; developmental

Recommended Citation

Guinigundo, Brianna; St.John, Aajonna; Pospichal, Katherine; and Gonzalez, Sebastian, "Who's a Good Kid? Perceived Parenting Practices & Altruism" (2026). High Impact Practices Student Showcase Spring 2026. 63.
https://stars.library.ucf.edu/hip-2026spring/63