Relationship of connected and separate knowing to parental style and birthorder

A total of 249 primarily middle-class, Caucasian college students (141 fema les, 108 males) completed the Knowing Styles Inventory (KSI) (Knight, Elfen bein, & Messina, 1995) to measure Connected and Separate Knowing and the Pa rental Authority Questionnaire (PAQ) (Buri, 1991), used to measure differen t parenting styles (authoritarian, authoritative, and permissive parenting) . Authoritative parenting style of the mother was positively associated wit h Connected Knowing, while authoritative parenting style of the father was negatively related to Separate Knowing for both the female and male partici pants of the study. For the female participants only, permissive parenting style of the father was positively related to Separate Knowing. Ir was also found that first-born college students scored significantly higher on Sepa rate knowing than later-born students. The results suggest that family expe riences may be precursors to the epistemologies of college students.