Gender differences in offense specific and dispositional forgiveness among Indian adolescents

In the few years, there has been a growing literature on interpersonal forgiveness from a variety of psychological perspective. Bonar (1989) contends that the need for forgiveness can be explained within every major system of psychology. Although it has, received relatively little empirical attention from psychologists and social scientists, forgiveness is a central topic in everyday life. From the personal level, to the family level, to the community level, to the international level, the quality of our relationships with others are largely determined by the willingness to forgive that we manifest towards the persons or the groups who have, intentionally or unintentionally, severely or slightly, durably or temporarily, harmed us (Park & Enright,1997). The aim of the present investigation was to compare males and females on the measures of Dispositional Forgiveness and offense specific Forgiveness. For this purpose, Forgiveness was assessed by using Heartland dispositional scale devised by Thompson and Snyder (2003) and Offense specific forgiveness was measured by using Enright Forgiveness Inventory (Enright & Human Development Study Group, 1998).These tests were administered on 400 students (200 males and 200 females) in the age range of 16-20 years. Descriptive statistics, t-ratios and stepwise discriminant functional analysis was used to analyze the data. Results clearly revealed that males are higher on the various dimensions of forgiveness. Results are discussed in detail.