Family Functioning among Rural Teens and Caregivers: Interactive Influence on Teen Dating Violence

Study on the types of abuse in young couples as a function of sex

This study analyses the types of violence that can occur in intimate partner relationships among young people and their self-perception of abuse. For this purpose, we have used a survey-type methodology, with a quantitative approach. Participants were selected by means of non-probabilistic convenience and consisted of students enrolled in different degree and postgraduate courses in the Faculty of Education Sciences of the University of Granada (Spain). The sample consisted of 323 students, with a mean age of 23.8 years (SD = 5.2). Statistical and inferential tests were carried out with the data obtained using the SPSS V26 data analysis programme. The results show that the type of maltreatment most suffered, at some time by the sample participants, is emotional maltreatment, physical maltreatment, and psychological maltreatment. By comparing the means obtained, we can conclude that sex did not influence the violence suffered by young couples, which gives it a bidirectional character.

Dating Violence: A Bibliometric Review of the Literature in Web of Science and Scopus

This study has the general purpose of improving the understanding and description of the field of violence in young couple relationships by means of a bibliometric analysis. A descriptive and transversal-retrospective methodology is used, the objective of which is to describe in a quantitative way the information obtained from the production of 842 references registered in the Scopus and Web of Science databases. The results show that during 2017 and 2018, the majority of publications were concentrated, highlighting that the United States is the country with the highest amount of scientific production on violence in intimate relationships. It is important to highlight that more and more countries are investigating this subject, highlighting an increase in production from 2015 onwards. The violence that occurs in the relationships of young couples is a global social and health problem that requires research to be able to deepen its knowledge and in the prevention of this social scourge.

Is Family Functioning Stable and Consistent over Time and Stakeholders? A Comparison of Adolescents' and Caregivers' Views

Family functioning is a key construct in research and practice involving children and youth. Given that multi-informant assessment of this construct is considered a best practice in research and clinical settings, ensuring measurement invariance of family functioning instruments is an important consideration for family science scholars and practitioners who increasingly use multiple groups or longitudinal designs in investigating family dynamics. Yet, studies involving family functioning provide limited reports of psychometric properties of key or contextual measures. This study used multigroup confirmatory factor analyses to examine measurement invariance of a short version of the McMaster Family Assessment device using data from caregivers (N = 479) and adolescents (N = 571) collected at two periods four years apart. Results revealed that configural and metric invariance of a short version of the family functioning measure hold both across groups (caregivers and adolescents) and time, thus providing the foundation for using this instrument to assess family functioning with different populations and at different time periods. However, evidence of only partial scalar invariance indicated that group comparisons might be biased. The article concludes with implications for family science scholars and practitioners, including caution in using mean scores to compare perceptions of family functioning across different populations, such as caregivers and adolescents.