Background. Entering university is a life transition for emerging adults who have to relocate themselves away from homes as well as confront with a wide range of problems and challenges in the new environment, especially for first year undergraduate students. Studies have shown that first year students were more likely to face several social problems due to their separation from family and secondary school friends. They will have to adapt to all these environmental changes while handling unfamiliar and heavy academic workload. Inevitably, significant social and psychological relearning processes that caused the feelings of confusion and anxiety may also affect their adjustments to university life. University adjustment is important for freshmen to utilize and assimilate the academic material successfully and to be able to form affable relations with peers and lecturers in university. Poor university adjustment will lead to high academic stress, problematic behavior and college dropout.  All along, past studies found that freshmen’s perceived attachment to the parents and peers are primarily contributed to successful transition amongst the emerging adults enrolling into universities. Parental attachment provides a foundation for positive social relationships in university while social support from peer could help freshmen to quickly adapt to the new environment. Therefore, this study aimed to analyze the relations among parental and peer attachments and university adjustment.

Methods. This study applied a cross-sectional research design. Survey data were collected from 267 freshmen (M_age = 20.81 years; 62.5% females) from four top public universities in Malaysia using purposive sampling technique. Over 50.0% of respondents are Malays (n = 143), followed by 32.2% of Chinese, 10.5% of Indians and 3.7% of respondents from other ethnic groups. A self-administered questionnaire consisting The Inventory of Parent and Peers Attachment (IPPA), The College Adjustment Test (CAT) and demographic information was employed. The data was analyzed with IBM Statistical Package for Social Science (SPSS) version 22.0. The relations between study variables were analyzed with Pearson correlational test while multiple regression is applied to test the predicting effects of parental and peer attachment on university adjustment.

Results. Parental attachment was negatively correlated with university adjustment (r = -.141; p = .021) while peer attachment was positive associated with university adjustment (r = .162, p = .008). By controlling the effect of age, gender and academic performance of respondents in multivariate model, both parental (β = -.281, p = .002) and peer (β = .288, p < .001) attachment were significant predictors for university adjustment.

Conclusions. First year students who reported higher level of parental attachment experience lower level of university adjustment. It can be explained by their anxiety and homesickness while they are away from home and separated from parents. Therefore, it is important to replace their insecure feelings and emptiness by spending time with their immediate nearby friends and peers. This study too revealed that higher level of peer attachment contributed to greater level of university adjustment. Sense of belonging and social integration associated with peer attachment are crucial in developing successful adaptation to university setting. The nature and quality of the attachment shift would be affected by secured parental attachment as it will be slowly weakening while more direct effects of peer attachment are enforced throughout the adaptation in the duration at university.

Added-values. The results showed that peer attachment is the stronger predictor for university adjustment than parental attachment. This suggested that emerging adulthood is the stage of shifting attachment from parents to peers or even romantic partners. Parents, especially for Asian parents, should avoid overprotective parenting practices and encourage their children to expand their social circles in order to overcome challenges independently. The findings also provided insights to practically assist the affiliated party such as the institutions or high-level decision makers in education field in developing a far better learning climate such as peer interactions or peer teaching programmes to help first year students make successful transitions to university lives.

Keywords: parental attachment, peer attachment, university adjustment, first year students