Parental divorce, parent-child bonds, and adult attachment orientations among college students: A comparison of three racial/ethnic groups

Despite evidence indicating that race/ethnicity and parental divorce may re spectively affect perceptions of family and other intimate relationships, t he conjoint influences of these sociodemographic variables on self-reports of both early (parent-child) and current (intimate adult) attachment relati onships have not been investigated. In the present study, the authors exami ned fa) the contributions of parental marital status and race/ethnicity to scores on these measures and (b) the relative abilities of parental bonds t o predict adult attachment orientations among students from different famil y backgrounds (i.e., intact and divorced) and from different racial/ethnic groups (i.e., White, Black, and Hispanic/Latino). Results indicated that ra ce/ethnicity and parents' marital status had significant effects on the att achment measures, and that the extent to which parental bonds predicted adu lt attachment orientations varied among students with different family back grounds and race/ethnicity Implications of these findings to the conceptual ization of college students' psychosocial development are discussed.