ABSTRACT Title: Exploring Facebooks Relationship to Parental Attachment, Independence, and Academic Adjustment of College Students Author: Kyle

Lunt, Communication CE Type: Course Capstone Thesis Approved By: Michael Morgan, Communication In a culture of ever-emerging social media technologies, our interpersonal interactions with those around us are in a constant state of change. It is important to monitor that change in order to analyze and understand its societal and cultural implications. This study seeks to investigate how the use of Facebook relates to a number of critical variables important to the parent-college student relationship. Existing research has explored how and by whom Facebook is used, while other studies have looked at attachment and independence in relation to collegiate adjustment; however, there remains a gap in the research, in that these variables have not been previously connected to Facebook use. This study investigates the potential role Facebook plays in supporting one end of a two-tailed hypothesis: that student-parent Facebook use correlates with healthy attachment, the promotion of individuation, and subsequently adjustment and success, OR that it correlates negatively with attachment, leading to increased dependence, suppressed individuation, and subsequently undermining adjustment. Independence, parental attachment, and ability to adjust to the collegiate academic environment are all important factors that can impact the future success of students. Findings suggest that student-parent Facebook communication correlates with attachment levels of parents and students of the same gender, and for females, is also linked to independence, proposing that Facebook may play a supporting role in completing a modified version of the first tail of the two-tailed hypothesis. While Facebook use adds to total parental communication, it does not appear to play a superior role to other media forms.