From a wide variety of possible styles of social interaction that might inevitably play a role in the development of independence and confirmative behavior in children, Subbotsky (1976) choose two styles, which he considered to be particularly relevant to the development of independent and confirmative behavior. The first being an authoritarian style the second a democratic style, of which he wrote; In an authoritarian style of social interaction (ASI) one party has the opportunity of controlling, and in fact does control, the action of another in his or her interests; the other party does not have this possibility. In a democratic style of social interaction (DSI), both parties have equal rights to control, and indeed do control, each other's actions according to certain common rules or programs. (1).

Subbotsky's decision to choose these two basic styles of social interaction was based on previous experiments he had conducted to determine which styles of interaction enhanced dependency in a child's behavior. He found that when a child was put in a situation wher

Subbotsky suggests that the studies on parenting styles supply us with no direct evidence for whether or not any one of the styles proposed might enhance confirmative or independent behavior in children. However, he does believe that some of the parenting classifications, identified in Baumrind studies do come close to his own scale of 'authoritarian Vs. democratic' style of social interaction. The studies also support his own hypothesis that children of restrictive and authoritative parents are more inclined to rely upon external authority in their moral judgments in comparison to children of responsive but demanding parents and that this relationship seemed to support his own findings. That a democratic style of social interaction appeared to enhance independent behavior, where as an authoritarian style of social interaction appeared to encourage conformity.

The posttest results of the study showed that independence had increased in both real and verbal behavior towards adults and peers, in children who had been assigned to the experimental groups. Where as, the children in the control group exhibited a decrease in independent behavior for all four measures. However, the differences between the independent behavior scores of the control group and the experimental group were not significant. The results also showed that children who had displayed a high imitation coefficient in the pretest trials, and who had displayed a passive attitude throughout the program, had by the time the program was finished seemed to have benefited most from the democratic style of interaction and were displaying the greatest change in their development of independent behavior.

(1) An equalization of the demands made on the respective behaviors of adult and child which both children and educator may equally exercise the functions of model and controller, and (2) the educator's repudiation of social control over the child's acts (rewards and punishments) as much as possible. (3)

Finally, another noticeable change in the behavioral characteristics of the children was their spontaneous creativity. This was displayed in a number of different ways, e.g in their use of language, when performing an assigned movement in their physical education class they would quite often vary it and they also became more imaginative and descriptive in both their modeling and drawing skills.

The children were then subjected to further testing using 3 different condition groups. In conditions 1 and 2 the child performed either the pretest or the posttest program with the same adult partner as in the training phase. Where as in condition 3 the child performed a new program with a new adult partner. The results showed that the children in the posttest group conformed more with the same authoritarian adult partner than did the children who performed the pretest program, again with the same partner. Children in condition 3 conformed to the same extent with the new adult partner as they did to the authoritarian partner. The conclusion made from these findings was that an authoritarian style of social interaction fosters conformity in children's behavior. However, the children who were assigned to the pretest program, after the training program continued to display the independent behavior they had shown before they'd been subjected to the training program.

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