A study to determine the effect of adult attachment style upon faith maturity and interpersonal problems of seminary student

Problem. The problem of this study was to determine the difference in the level of faith maturity and interpersonal problems across four groups of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary students. The four groups were those students who were categorized as either Secure, Preoccupied, Dismissing-Avoidant, or Fearful-Avoidant as measured by the Relationship Scales Questionnaire.;Procedures. In this study 300 seminary students, approximately ten percent of the Fort Worth, Texas seminary population, were classified into groups of either Secure, Dismissing-Avoidant, Preoccupied, Fearful-Avoidant, or Unable to Classify attachment style by use of Bartholomew's Relationship Scales Questionnaire. The Unable to Classify group was formed because fifteen respondents had the same scores on two or more of the categories in the Relationship Scales Questionnaire. The Faith Maturity Scale and Inventory of Personal Problems were administered to each respondent to obtain scores for level of faith maturity and interpersonal problems. A one-way Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) was used to determine if the variation of scores was greater than would be expected from random sample fluctuation with alpha set at.05. Because only the Secure group was large enough to indicate a normal distribution, the Kruskal-Wallis, a nonparametric equivalent of the one-way ANOVA, was used to test for individual mean differences and the Mann-Whitney U test, a nonparametric equivalent to the independent samples t-test, was run to test for differences between various group means.;Findings and conclusions. The results of the ANOVA showed that the differences in scores on both the Faith Maturity Scale and the Inventory of Interpersonal Problems were greater than would have occurred by chance, and the Kruskal-Wallis yielded the same results. The Mann-Whitney U indicated that the Secure group scored significantly higher on the Faith Maturity Scale and significantly lower on the Inventory of Interpersonal Problems than did the other groups, confirming the hypothesis of the study.