Families' schemata of social relationships

Accuracy of Retrospective Reports of Family Environment

Retrospective reports of family environments are often the only way to collect data concerning the influence of a child's experience in the family on later development. However, the accuracy of retrospective measures can be problematic because of social desirability or potential failures of memory. The purpose of this study is to compare retrospective and prospective measures of family environment. In this unique study, 198 parents and 241 adolescent children (mean age 15.7) described their family environment, and then 25 years later completed retrospective reports. We test the effects of memory, positivity, gender, and generation on retrospective reports, as well as testing the ability of prospective and retrospective measures to predict adult well-being and adult-child/elder-parent relationships. Results show moderate correlations of .30 - .45 between prospective and retrospective measures. In examining the relative effectiveness of prospective and retrospective measures to predict later life outcomes, we find that retrospective reports of the family environment most validly capture influences on the child in domains of strong emotional content but are less successful in cognitive domains.

Adolescent Process and Family Organization: A Model of Development as a Function of Family Paradigm

Adolescent behavior and development are generally recognized as mediated, in part, by family process. Based on research and clinical experience, a framework has been developed that organizes the diversity of family styles and structures into fundamental themes, or family paradigms, around which family process can be organized. Following work of Kantor, Reiss, Olson, and Constantine, these paradigmatic themes are characterized as closed/traditional, random/individualistic, open/collaborative, and synchronous/harmonious. This framework has been elaborated to systematically link individuation in adolescent development to enduring features of family style and world view. Whereas support for differentiation from the family and separation or autonomous functioning varies with paradigm, adolescents raised under different child-rearing regimes may face quite different developmental tasks. Issues that are salient for adolescents from close/traditional families with strong parental authority, for example, may not be as important developmentally for those raised in the more permissive style of a random/individualistic paradigm. Normal development and clinical issues are both argued to be systematically related to family paradigm.

Using the Five Field Map to Describe the Social Network of Children: A Methodological Study

There is a persistent need to find usable ways of measuring social network and support for children. Up to now virtually nothing is known about the social network from the child's viewpoint. In order to evaluate whether drawing a structured social network map (the Five Field Map) could serve as a way of elucidating important aspects of the social world of children, the maps of different samples of children were studied. In a school class of 27 children, aged 11 years, a test-retest study was undertaken. The essential aspects of the map showed good stability over time. The map was compared with other instruments of social interaction in different samples. Predicted associations were found in the nonclinical samples. Aspects of the map measuring dissatisfaction, negative contacts, and conflicts were found to be associated with behaviour problems. The closeness factor of the map and reported dissatisfaction and conflicts differentiated a normal group of children living in single-parent families from a similar group of children with psychiatric problems. The Five Field Map contributes important knowledge about how children perceive their social world. It can thus be considered a suitable instrument to describe the social network from the child's point of view.

Family members' influence on decision making about food: differences in perception and relationship with healthy eating

PURPOSE

This study provides insight into decision making about food choices in the family and its relationship with (un)healthy eating, by including the responses of four members of the family as a sampling unit.

SETTING

The study was conducted through four medical centers, visited by 69 classes from 19 different schools in Belgium.

SUBJECTS

Ninety-two family quartets, including both parents and two adolescents between 12 and 18 years old, completed questionnaires independently.

MEASURES

Four previously investigated measures of decision-making power (30 items on a seven-point scale) were administered, along with a short food choice questionnaire and demographic variables.

RESULTS

Results indicate that the influence of fathers but more especially that of children is important in food decisions. Moreover, the relative influence of each family member is dependent on the kind of product or product group considered. Differences in perceptions between the four family members show the importance of considering the responses of all the people involved in family decision making. Finally, it is clear that in families where adolescents have more power, food choices are less healthy.

CONCLUSIONS

Our main conclusion is the rejection of the "gatekeeper hypothesis" as an artifact of biased measurement. A multidimensional approach to the issue of influence in food decision making in the family is potentially richer and leads to different conclusions. The necessity of the involvement of the entire family for the introduction and adoption of healthy eating is emphasized.

The art of recruitment: the foundation of family and linkage studies of psychiatric illness

Family and linkage studies of psychiatric illness involve special benefits and challenges in the field of scientific investigation. The success of a family or linkage study is dependent on the recruitment process. The most informative and reliable method of data collection in this field of investigation is through direct interviews with as many family members as possible. Although there are circumstances when direct interviewing is not possible, there are other circumstances, such as refusal of relatives to participate, that deserve closer scrutiny. The complexities involved in the recruitment process while conducting medical investigations have been explored in the literature. However, special issues relevant to the recruitment process merit further exploration for working with families in the context of family and linkage studies of psychiatric illness. Careful understanding of this psychiatric illness. Careful understanding of this critical topic may minimize the incidence of family nonparticipation in such research endeavors. This article addresses these issues as they relate to recruiting individuals and their families in this field of investigation. These issues include the role of attitudes, values and beliefs, family interaction and the identification of influential members, informal communication networking, informed consent while promoting the research, and ethical concerns.

Adolescent-parent attachments and family problem-solving styles

Variation in exploratory and collaborative behavior among family members define different problem-solving styles or "paradigms" in families. Similar characteristics distinguish patterns of attachment within dyads. This suggests an association between these phenomena. The hypothesis was tested in a laboratory study of families with young adolescents. Using the Reiss Card Sort Procedure (CSP) and a newly developed scheme for classifying adolescent attachments, it was demonstrated that particular problem-solving styles were linked to specific patterns of adolescent-parent attachments. An association of paradigms and attachment patterns may afford a new perspective on the dialectical interplay between individual and family development. The probabilities of paradigm-attachment association could prove useful when choosing an intervention model for family therapy.

A family's coming to terms with Alzheimer's disease

Findings of a qualitative analysis of several members of a family in which one member has Alzheimer's Disease (AD) support the notion that differences in how each family member defines and makes meaning of the situation have consequences for the family as a unit. Ten in-depth individual and dyadic interviews of five available family members were conducted during a period of 18 months. Data support the finding that each member of the family experienced a similar process of coming to terms with changes in the person who has AD. This process consisted of three stages: identifying how the person with AD was the same as he was before, as well as how he was different, prior to disease onset; redefining the identity of the person with AD; and rewriting one's relationship with the person with AD. This study supports both Knafl's and Deatrick's concept of family management and Patterson's concept of family meaning.

Family System Test (FAST): are parents' and children's family constructs either different or similar, or both?

Perceptions of family cohesion and hierarchy structures were assessed by the Family System Test (FAST), a clinically-derived figure placement technique. Parents (N = 140) and their preadolescent offspring (N = 70) completed typical and conflict representations in individual as well as group settings. Typical representations were characterized by balanced family structures (i.e. cohesive and moderately hierarchical) and those displaying conflict situations showed predominantly unbalanced patterns. FAST portrayals were related to respondent (mother vs. father vs. child). Fathers represented typical family relations as balanced more often than mothers. Regarding conflict representations, children were more likely than fathers to portray the family as unbalanced. However, analyses of representations of the same family (i.e. intra-family comparisons) indicated that all respondents differed in their perceptions and, that fathers' typical portrayals showed most often the same structure as those done by the family members as a group.

The Family System Test: differences in perception of family structures between nonclinical and clinical children

Nonclinical respondents and psychiatric outpatients (N = 400) between the first and twelfth grades portrayed their families as they perceived them in typical and in conflict situations using the Family System Test (FAST), a figure placement technique that focuses on cohesion and hierarchy in the family. Results showed that typical representations were influenced by whether a respondent was a patient or not, but not by the type of mental disorder. Clinical respondents were less likely to represent their families as being either cohesive, moderately hierarchical or as having clear generational boundaries. In conflict representations, both clinical and nonclinical respondents indicated low cohesion in family patterns. Results were interpreted from a family systems approach as well as from a clinical perspective.

Family concepts and their measurement: things are seldom what they seem

An empirical examination of the degree of association of dimensions elicited by two family assessment instruments is presented. There were no associations among dimensions whose descriptors suggested a good amount of similarity. The results strongly suggest additional study of correspondence among assessment methods that appear to tap similar family properties, with particular attention directed to the correspondence between self-report and direct observational procedures.

Sensory experience and family process: perceptual styles tend to run in but not necessarily run families

The science of family systems has begun to develop concepts and methods for objectively assessing important characteristics of families. Thus we now have ways of measuring differences among families with respect to cohesiveness, flexibility, clarity of communication, and shared views of social reality. We know practically nothing, however, about the origins of these differences among families. One possibility is that the skills or personal attributes of one or more individual members influences the characteristics of the family as a whole. This paper explores the hypothesis that the perceptual styles of individual members--the ways they organize their experience of their personal stimulus world--influence the shared perceptions the family develops of the social world in which it lives. We explored relationships between nine measures of perceptual style and problem-solving measures of the family's shared perception of its social world. The findings showed many similarities among members of the same family on several measures of perceptual style. However, perceptual style had only a few relationships with family performance in the problem-solving task.