Childrearing Attitudes among Mothers Volunteering and Revolunteering for a Psychological Study

Abstract

Although the generality of findings in personality research is often limited by biases resulting from the use of volunteer Ss, this problem has not often been studied in non-student populations where there are no captive Ss to provide baseline data. A sample of 168 mothers was recruited by newspaper advertisement for a study of childcare attitudes using the Maternal Attitude Scale, a Likert-type questionnaire. of these volunteers, 64% revolunteered for additional studies. Significant results indicated that mothers who did not revolunteer felt less satisfaction in caring for infants, felt less ability to achieve reciprocity with the child, and expressed more conventional and stereotyped childcare attitudes than mothers who elected to revolunteer.