Beavers Systems Model the Six Areas of Family Functioning

The vastness of the field

About of the more than v,000 listings on the family unit in the Harvard libraries appear to exist by professionals in social psychology and human evolution. Effigy 4.1 illustrates the daunting quantity of this piece of work in the subset of theories relating to family development over the life bicycle (Mattessich and Hill 1987). Fortunately for our project, these fields produce periodic review volumes. While this trunk of work focuses on middle-grade, largely White, North American families, it distinguishes and classifies various categories of findings that provide useful starting points for report and for comparison in other cultures and settings. Approaches tin be broadly divided according to their focus:

i. On the family as an entity; its adjustment and preservation;

2. On kid development, viewing the family in terms of its contributions to child welfare;

three. On the family as a system with internal dynamics that produce developmental and welfare outcomes of its members.

Nosotros reviewed selected aspects of this literature under these 3 headings.

The majority of family unit studies are non direct pertinent to inter national development, yet they often suggest relevant inquiry that might be conducted in the future. Many questions of relevance to international development remain to be investigated - for example, the extent to which skills and other traits made available through the social context are transmitted to the kid through the bureau of the family.

Fig. four.1 - Genealogy of evolving family development frameworks from origins in family life-cycle categories, theories of man and life-bridge evolution, and theories of life events and life crises (source: Mattessich and Hill 1987)

The family as an entity

Kreppner and Lerner (1989), in their introduction to the book Family Systems and Lifetime Development, note the following different perspectives on the family itself:

1. A organization focusing on general dimensions of family interaction and taking into business relationship all family members;

ii. A series of dyadic interactions;

3. The sum of interactions amidst all family subgroupings - dyadic, triadic, tetradic;

4. A organisation of internal relations in reaction to broader contexts such every bit external social back up, intergenerational, and historic influences.

Much research also has described the family as a social entity with a predictable life bike (Mattessich and Hill 1987). Of involvement for international development are the life-cycle models studies of work and stress and the systems models designed for family counselling and preservation activities.

Life-cycle models

Life-cycle and family unit development models (Mattessich and Hill 1987) usually divide the family life bike into seven stages: newly established (childless); changeable (infants and preschool children); with schoolchildren; with secondary-schoolhouse or adolescent children; with young adults anile 18 or over; middle-aged (children launched); ageing in retirement. Within any given civilization, similar stages can exist defined and tin be specified for single-parent, polygamous, or other family configurations, such as the number and functions of siblings. This approach dovetails with the concerns of Bruce and Lloyd (1992), noted in chapter 3 on economics, that more than needs to be known nearly the furnishings of variation in household composition.

Effigy iv.2 from Mattessich and Hill (1987, 460) illustrates the potential usefulness of life-bike research for targeting development inputs by showing that families are nearly likely to have insufficient resources in the early child-bearing stage, just are most probable to be dissatisfied with their resources when their children reach school historic period. Stages at which the family unit is nearly susceptible to disintegration also might be identified by this method (with special reference to couples who divide non long after the nativity of a kid).

Fig. four.2 Stages of the family unit life cycle (source: Mattessich and Hill 1987)

Families and work

Piotrkowski, Rapoport, and Rapoport (1987) review many industrialized state studies linking the work of spouses to family satisfaction, stability, and other welfare measures. The availability of alternate child care and the effects on the family unit of balancing domestic and income-generating tasks are major issues. This domestic literature provides hypotheses and discussion topics for international researchers in intra-household and women's economic studies. Some studies link male occupational status and earnings positively to marital satisfaction, simply find the opposite for women, with high female person job status and earnings correlated to low self-esteem and low in males and greater probability of dissolution of the wedlock. These findings are counterbalanced by other studies reporting positive family effects of women's work (Skinner 1980).

Poor family correlates of women'southward work appear linked to lower-center-course beliefs that the married woman's work is an indicator of the husband's failure as a breadwinner; favourable outcomes are linked to more egalitarian upper-middle-course beliefs. Job satisfaction is significantly linked to positive parent-child interactions, but very loftier job involvement requiring long work hours strains all aspects of family unit functioning, specially when the female partner is job-involved.

Conventional gender roles that assign near domestic work to the female partner prove extremely resistant to change, even when both partners earn equally outside the dwelling (Blumenstein and Schwartz 1985). Rather than evolving towards more than egalitarian solutions over the course of a matrimony, conventional roles become more rigid and restrictive (Mattessich and Hill 1987).

Stress and coping

Family stress theory can be practical to disquisitional work events that negatively touch the family, such as task loss, and to chronic work stressors such equally job dissatisfaction, instability, shift work, inadequate child care, and role overload (Piotrkowski and Kattz 1983). Other sources of family unit stress are death, divorce, separation, affliction, and social dysfunction.

Stress theory (Boss 1987) studies the miracle of family coping, which is the management of a stressful event by the family every bit a group and by each private in the family. "Coping refers to efforts to main weather condition of harm, threat or challenge when a routine or automatic response is non readily available" (Monet and Lazarus 1977, viii).

Figure four.3 shows a contextual model of family stress. The sequence A-B-CX at the middle has been termed the ABC-Ten model, where A is the crisis event, B the resources available, C the perception of the event, and 10 the caste of manifested stress. On the basis of all the influences represented in the model, the family mobilizes its resources either into constructive coping or negatively into crisis. Thus, coping is a process involving the cognitive, emotional, and behavioural responses of the family as a collective. Summarizing research in this field, Dominate (1987) concludes that the master determinant of why some families cope while others fall into crunch is the meaning that the consequence holds for the family and the individuals inside it. The extent to which effective interpretations result in adequate coping depend on the degree of support provided by the internal and external contexts. We return to the theme of coping in our give-and-take of Schneewind'due south model of the family unit (Schneewind 1989) at the cease of this chapter.

Fig. 4.3 The contextual model of family unit stress (source: Boss 1987)

Counselling models

These family unit systems models provide conceptual frameworks that can be used in counselling by marital and family unit therapists. They draw their rationale from perceptions regarding the social changes in family unit construction discussed in chapter 2. Burgess (1926) theorized that the family unit had changed in function from an economic institution to a structure for providing companionship, and should henceforth be divers as a network of interpersonal relationships. These frameworks have tended to use circumplex models, with two-dimensional classification schemes (Becker and Krug 1964; Peterson and Rollins 1987).

Fig. iv.4 Circumplex model - couple and family map (source: Olson, Russell, and Sprengkle 1984)

Olson (Olson, Sprengkle, and Russell 1979; Olson, Russell, and Sprengkle 1984; Olson and Lavee 1989) has been influential in designing a circumplex model of marital and family systems (fig. 4.4). The model depicts two dimensions- "cohesion" and "adaptability" and makes utilize of a third dimension called "communication," which is non pictured (Olson and Lavee 1989). These iii dimensions were drawn from the conceptual clustering of concepts from six social science fields, including family therapy (Kaslow 1987).

Family cohesion is divers as the "emotional bonding that family members have toward one another" (Olson, Russell, and Sprengkle 1984, lx). Specific indicators for measuring the family cohesion dimension are emotional bonding, boundaries, coalitions, fourth dimension, space, friends, decision-making, and interests and recreation. The cohesion dimension ranges from "disengaged" (very low) to "separated" (low to moderate) to "connected" (moderate to high) to "enmeshed" (very loftier). The extremes (disengaged or enmeshed) are considered to be problematic. Families falling in the middle of the dimension (separated or connected) are healthy, considering family members tin exist both contained of, and connected to, their families.

The second dimension, "adjustability," is defined as "the ability of the marital or family unit system to change in its power structure, role relationships, and relationship rules in response to situational and developmental stress" (Olson, Russell, and Sprengkle 1984, 60). This dimension ranges from "rigid" (very depression) to "structured" (low to moderate), to "flexible" (moderate to high), to "cluttered" (very high). Again, a center range of the dimension is considered to characterize a well-functioning family. A structured relationship is mostly less rigid, less authoritarian, and more shared. A flexible relationship is even less rigid and the leadership is more every bit shared. A rigid relationship (highly disciplinarian) and a chaotic human relationship (has erratic or limited leadership) are considered to be problematic for individual and human relationship development in the long run.

Based on the two dimensions (cohesion and adaptability), the 16 types of marital and family systems shown in figure iv.4 have been used in clinical diagnosis and for specifying handling goals with couples and families. The tertiary dimension, family communication, is not pictured but is considered to exist a facilitating dimension that enables families to move on the other two dimensions.

Olson and Lavee (1989) summarize similar work by 11 other theorists (table four.1). In the variation represented by the Beavers system model (Beavers and Voeller 1963), cohesion is rephrased equally a centripetal-tocentrifugal dimension: a centripetal family type finds the almost relationship satisfaction inside the family; a centrifugal family, in contrast, views virtually human relationship satisfaction as coming from outside the family. Beavers' formulation brings in life-cycle considerations: for instance, a family unit with small children is more centripetal; as the family matures and children grow up, such a family unit may movement to a more than centrifugal manner. All such generalizations must be seen as culture specific, however: in certain societies, it may be mothers with young children who engage nigh frequently in neighbourhood activities (Fischer 1977), and grandparents who are most centripetally involved with their children and grandchildren.

Experience with these models may provide a useful starting point for designing similarly synthetic culturally appropriate models in other countries. The importance of the models may lie less in their accuracy of representation than in their ability to appoint counselors and families in a dialogue or bargaining process through which issues surface and are discussed, family communications improve, and problems such as anger or low are resolved. Expressing the positions of different families and family unit members, along a continuum such equally "cohesiveness" that is value free, relieves the negotiators from labelling them as good or bad. "Balance" may be viewed equally a positive term for compromises that reduce family stress.

Table four.1 Theoretical models using cohesion, adaptability, communication

Reference	Cohesion	Adjustability	Communication
Beavers and Voeller (1983)	Centripetal- centrifugal	Adaptability	Affect
Benjamin (1977)	Affiliation	Interdependence
Epstein, Bishop, and Levin (1978)	Melancholia interest	Behaviour command, problem-solving roles	Communication, melancholia responsiveness
French and Guidera (1974)		Capacity to change power
Gottman (1979)	Validation	Contrasting
Kantor and Lehr (1975)	Affect dimension	Ability dimension
Fifty'Allay (1987)	Intimacy	Power
Leary (1957);	Amore	Dominance
Constantine (1986)	Hostility	Submission
Leff and Vaughn (1985)	Distance	Trouble solving
Parsons and Bales (1955)	Expressive role	Instrumental role
Reiss (1981)	Coordination	Closure

Source: Olson and Lavee (1989).

Every civilization has its own polarizing bug, over which family members engage in bargaining. These problems could be determined through focus groups and other forms of enquiry and so depicted experimentally forth the axes of circumplex models. Acceptable degrees of cohesion are civilisation specific. The concept that enmeshment is undesirable is a value judgment that may exist specific to US or Western culture of the twentieth century. As noted in chapter 2, the cultural ideal of the good family has changed in the Due west from 1 of greater to less "closeness." A leading American economist (Becker 1981, 244) endorsed this shift in values: "Nostalgia for the supposed closeness of traditional families overlooks the restrictions on privacy and free choice, the very imperfect protection confronting disasters, and the limited opportunities to transcend family groundwork."

Many societies continue to value family unit togetherness above privacy, autonomy, or gratuitous choice, and notwithstanding the family unit seems to function well at the enmeshed extreme of Olson's model. (Olson, Russell, and Sprengkle [1984] did admit that as long every bit all the members are willing to accept the expectation of family unit togetherness, the family tin role well.)

While an adaptability dimension may prove universal, the caste to which adaptability implies shared determination-making is probable to vary. The Olson model assumes that certain structures, such equally egalitarianism or commonwealth, are meliorate than others. Some argue that in societies with highly differentiated gender roles, equally in some African and Asian countries, a male-dominated leadership blueprint within the family unit is perceived to be fair past the family members. Meanwhile, feminists within these cultures contend that such consensus is itself highly contested and a matter of struggle and power relations.

For purposes of modelling the effects of practiced versus poor management on developmental outcomes, these models are conceptually flawed by imitation sets of opposites. On the dimension of cohesion, for instance, some of the worst-managed families are both disengaged from each other emotionally and overly enmeshed in each others' lives - where uncommunicative adult children continue to live intrusively in their parents' homes, for example. The "false opposites" problem also could explain why family members rarely rate themselves in the same quadrants equally do the therapists working with them (Olson and Lavee 1989): Friedman, Utada, and Morissey (1987) establish that family members tended to rate their families every bit disengaged, whereas therapists tended to rate these same families as enmeshed.

Marital and family unit therapy

Counselling on the basis of the above models is embedded in the broader field of spousal relationship counselling and family unit therapy (Kaslow 1987). Marriage counselling in an informal context is as old as the family: family unit problems are a common reason for consulting elders and religious practitioners and for seeking dispute resolution. In Yoruba traditional order (affiliate seven), information technology is non uncommon for domestic disputes to exist brought before a third party, known for his or her wisdom. Similar traditional midwives, such family unit counselors may potentially serve as a resource for development.

In the United States, marriage counselling entered the formal exercise of therapy in the 1920s (Kaslow 1987). Family unit therapy evolved, following World State of war II, out of frustration over the slow improvement of individuals in therapy nether weather in which their family unit contributed to their pathology. It continues to exist primarily an adjunct to the treatment of troubled individuals who oft are viewed every bit acting out the pathology of the family unit equally a whole. Kaslow reviews the nine "schools" of marriage and family unit therapy, depicted on the horizontal centrality of figure iv.5. About recently, avant-garde or post-modern family unit therapists are interested in language and stories that families relate about themselves. The therapist and family together generate a new narrative, transforming the pathological tale that first created the family unit problem. Healing occurs during the procedure of searching for significant (Doherty 1991).

The formal approaches of these and similar schools draw heavily on Western intellectual tradition. They could possibly contribute to the design of family preservation programmes in countries that have well-established therapeutic practitioners drawing on the same traditions; such countries might include United mexican states and the Philippines. Cognition of the techniques taught by these schools provides no substitute for personal ability: personal style and talent appear to decide the success of these approaches, which often are almost synonymous with the names of their founders (Kaslow 1987).

Counselling for family management

The circumplex models do not deal with the domicile economics problems of providing concrete resources such equally money, food, or wellness care. These aspects can affect family functioning; as noted by the National University of Sciences (1976), inadequate resources are the key villain in undermining the families' capability for child evolution.

The McMaster model of family functioning (MMFF), described past Epstein, Bishop, and Baldwin (1984), has been a workhorse model for family management counselling for 25 years. This model'south stated supposition is that the primary office of the family unit is to provide a setting for the development and maintenance of family unit members on the biological, social, and psychological levels (Epstein, Bishop, and Baldwin 1984, 78). Hence, family issues are grouped into 3 areas - the basic chore surface area, the developmental task area, and the hazardous task area.

Fig. 4.5 The ix schools of marriage and family theory (source: Kaslow 1987)

The MMFF model puts the basic task area (providing nutrient, money, transportation, and shelter) every bit the nearly fundamental of the iii areas. The developmental job area includes family bug related to the stages of developmental sequence of the family unit. At the private level, these issues include crises in infancy, childhood, or adolescence; at the family level, these could exist such issues as the start of the marriage or the kickoff pregnancy. The hazardous tasks expanse encompasses how families handle crises resulting from accidents, illness, or loss of income or task, for instance. The MMFF model suggests that families who are unable to handle these task areas are most likely to develop clinically significant bug.

The MMFF model has half-dozen dimensions of family functioning that designate the structure, organization, and transactional patterns of the family unit. These half dozen dimensions are problem solving, communication, roles, affective responsiveness, affective interest, and behaviour control. A summary outline is presented in tabular array 4.2.

The definition of salubrious or effective family operation according to the MMFF model is summarized equally follows. An effectively functioning family unit is expected to bargain with each dimension successfully. Effective families solve their problems easily, whereas ineffectively functioning families do not deal with at least some of their bug. Constructive families communicate in a clear and direct style, have clear and reasonable roles and accountability, are capable of expressing a full range of emotions, have empathic involvement in particular activities and interests of individual family unit members, and have flexible behaviour control.

The MMFF model lays strong foundations for the transmission of coping skills and for conflict resolution. Nosotros believe that this model also provides a useful starting framework for developing other like civilisation-specific tools. The use of the MMFF cross-culturally would require empirical testing of the skills dimensions appropriate to the setting: for example, in Javanese society information technology is socially unacceptable to express anger freely, even inside the family; anger is unremarkably shown very subtly or through refusal to speak.

Table 4.2 Summary of dimension concepts of McMaster model of family performance

Problem solving

2 types of problems:
- Instrumental and melancholia

7 stages to the procedure:

1. Identification of the trouble
2. Advice of the problem to the appropriate person(south)
3. Development of activity alternatives
4. Decision on one alternative
5. Action
6. Monitoring the activeness
vii. Evaluation of success

Postulated:
- Well-nigh effective when all seven stages are carried out
- To the lowest degree effective when families cannot identify problem (stop before step 1)

Communication

Instrumental and affective areas

Two independent dimensions:

1. Clear and directly
2. Articulate and indirect
3. Masked and direct
4. Masked and indirect

Postulated:
- Well-nigh effective: clear and direct
- To the lowest degree effective: masked and indirect

Roles: two family function types

Necessary and other

Two areas of family functions

Instrumental and affective

Necessary family part groupings

A. Instrumental

one. Provision of resources

B. Melancholia

1. Nurturance and back up
2. Developed sexual gratification

C. Mixed

ane. Life skills development
2. Systems maintenance and direction

Other family functions

Adaptive and maladaptive
- Role functioning is assessed by considering how the family allocates responsibilities and handles accountability for them

Postulated:

- Most effective when all necessary family functions have articulate allocation to reasonable individual(s) and accountability is congenital in
- Least effective when necessary family functions are non addressed and/or allocation and accountability are not maintained.

Melancholia responsiveness

Two groupings:
1. Welfare emotions
2. Emergency emotions

Postulated:

- Most effective when a full range of responses is appropriate in amount and quality to stimulus
- To the lowest degree effective when range is very narrow (one or two affects only) and/or amount and quality is distorted, given the context

Melancholia involvement

A range of involvement with six styles identified:

one. Absence of involvement
ii. Interest devoid of feelings
three. Narcissistic involvement
4. Empathic involvement
5. Overinvolvement
vi. Symbiotic involvement

Postulated:

- Almost effective: empathic involvement
- To the lowest degree effective: symbiotic involvement and absence of involvement

Behaviour control

Applies to 3 situations:

1. Dangerous situations
two. Meeting and expressing psychobiological needs and drives (eating, drinking, sleeping, eliminating, sex, and aggression)
3. Interpersonal socializing behaviour inside and outside the family

Standard and breadth of acceptable behaviour determined by four styles:

1. Rigid
2. Flexible
three. Laissez-faire
4. Chaotic

To maintain the style, various techniques are used and implemented under "role" functions (systems maintenance and management)

Postulated:

- Most constructive: flexible behaviour control
- Least constructive: cluttered behaviour command

Source: Epstein, Bishop, and Baldwin (1984).

The family from a kid development perspective

Theories of kid development, which approach the family from the child perspective, include concerns with nature versus nurture, the flexibility or plasticity of the child at dissimilar ages to being moulded by the family unit, and the relative permanence of family influences (Kreppner and Lerner 1989). The evolution of the kid is viewed as post-obit a probabilistic epigenetic class - according to which, biology remains a prime mover but the developmental results depend on reciprocal interaction between biological science and the social context, and hence on the probability that biological sensitive points in the child and the social and ecology resource of the family will come together to produce certain outcomes (Lerner 1989).

This approach to the family elaborates theories regarding family factors as determinants of child upshot that have been useful in the design of such social interventions as the Head Starting time Program, later on championed past Lerner. It includes the investigation of psychological resilience, or why some children thrive in adverse circumstances. Exploration of family unit effects often is reduced to the examination of dyadic parent-child interactions, unremarkably focusing on the female parent-kid dyed, with little attention to family dynamics.

The Bronfenbrenner model

Bronfenbrenner (1979) placed child development in an ecological perspective. His ground-breaking work combined aspects of folklore and developmental psychology and laid an enduring foundation for future approaches. The relationships between individuals and their environments are viewed as "mutually shaping." Brofenbrenner saw the individual'due south experience "as a set of nested structures, each inside the side by side, like a set of Russian dolls" (Bronfenbrenner 1979, 22). In studying man development, 1 has to meet within, beyond, and "across" how the several systems collaborate (family, workplace, and economic system). The study of the ability of families to access and manage resources across these systems would appear to be a logical extension of his investigations. His iv interlocking systems that shape individual development are equally follows:

1. The micro-system. At this level the family enters Bronfenbrenner's framework, merely only in terms of its interpersonal interactions with the child. Information technology is the level within which a kid experiences immediate interactions with other people. At the kickoff, the micro-system is the home, involving interactions with only 1 or two people in the family ("dyadic" or "triadic" interaction). As the child ages, the microsystem is more complex, involving more people - such as in a child-care centre or preschool. Bronfenbrenner noted that every bit long as increased numbers in a child's micro-system hateful more enduring reciprocal relationships, increasing the size of the system will enhance kid development.

2. The meso-system. Meso-systems are the interrelationships among settings (i.eastward. the dwelling house, a day-intendance centre, and the schools). The stronger and more diverse the links among settings, the more powerful an influence the resulting systems will be on the child'southward development. In these interrelationships, the initiatives of the child, and the parents' interest in linking the home and the school, play roles in determining the quality of the kid's meso-arrangement.

3. The exo-arrangement. The quality of interrelationships among settings is influenced past forces in which the child does not participate, but which have a direct begetting on parents and other adults who interact with the child. These may include the parental workplace, school boards, social service agencies, and planning commissions.

four. The macro-organisation. Macro-systems are "blueprints" for interlocking social forces at the macro-level and their interrelationships in shaping human development. They provide the wide ideological and organizational patterns within which the meso- and exo-systems reverberate the ecology of man development. Macro-systems are not static, merely might modify through evolution and revolution. For example, economical recession, war, and technological changes may produce such changes.

Bronfenbrenner'due south conceptual framework proved a useful starting point for multivariate systems research in which family considerations became secondary to the pattern of institution-based social programmes focusing on children.

The Belsky process model

Belsky (1984) pioneered theories of the processes of competent parental operation. His model focused on factors affecting parental behaviour and how such factors affect child-rearing, which in turn influences child evolution. At the family level, Belsky'southward interest, like Bronfenbrenner'southward, is primarily on interpersonal interactions between parent and kid. Developed to explain the causes of kid abuse and neglect,

The model presumes that parenting is direct influenced by forces emanating from within the private parent (personality), within the private child (child characteristics of individuality), and from the broader social context in which the parent-kid relationship is embedded. Specifically, marital relations, social networks, and jobs influence individual personality and general psychological well-being of parents and, thereby, parental functioning and, in turn, child development. (Belsky 1984, 84)

Through an intensive literature search, Belsky drew the post-obit conclusions regarding the determinants of parenting (Belsky 1984, 84)

(one) parenting is multiply adamant past characteristics of the parent, of the child, and of contextual subsystems of social support; (2) these three determinants are non every bit influential in supporting or undermining parenting; and (3) developmental history and personality shape parenting indirectly, by first influencing the broader context in which parent-kid relations exist (i.e., marital relations, social networks, occupational experience).

Belsky found that parental personality and psychological wellbeing were the most influential of the determinants in supporting parental performance. When ii of 3 determinants are in the stressful situation, he stated that parental operation is most protected when parental personality and psychological well-being withal function to promote sensitive caring. In other words, optimal parenting nevertheless occurs fifty-fifty when the personal psychological resources of parents are the but determinant remaining in positive style.

The influence of contextual subsystems of social support is greater than the influence of kid characteristics on parental functioning. On the basis of his review of the literature, Belsky determined that risk characteristics in the child are relatively piece of cake to overcome, given that either 1 of the other two determinants is not at adventure.

The Belsky process model does not specifically ascertain the child'due south developmental outcome (Belsky defined it as competent offspring, without whatsoever further explanation). No special attention is given to the importance of the family's fabric resource, while the family's social resources are conceptualized impersonally equally the contextual subsystem of back up. Belsky's work is most useful in exonerating the kid of blame for poor outcomes. Blame, all the same, might seem to shift to the parent, as parental personality is viewed as a relatively transcendent or intrinsic and immutable characteristic.

Table 4.3 Characteristics of developmentally stimulating environments

1. The optimal development of a young child requires an environment ensuring gratification of all basic physical needs and conscientious provisions for health and safety.

2. The evolution of a young child is fostered by the following:

(a) a relatively high frequency of developed contact involving a relatively minor number of adults;

(b) a positive emotional climate in which the kid learns to trust others and himself;

(c) an optimal level of demand gratification;

(d) the provision of varied and patterned sensory input in an intensity range that does not overload the child'due south capacity to receive, classify, and reply;

(eastward) people who respond physically, verbally, and emotionally with sufficient consistency and clarity to provide uses as to appropriate and valued behaviours and to reinforce such behaviours when they occur;

(f) an surroundings containing a minimum of social restrictions on exploratory and motor behaviour;

(g) careful arrangement of the concrete and temporal environment that permits expectancies of objects and events to be confirmed or revised;

(h) the provision of rich and varied cultural experiences rendered interpretable past consistent persons with whom the experiences are shared;

(i) the availability of play materials that facilitate the coordination of sensorimotor processes and a play surround permitting their utilization;

(j) contact with adults who value achievement and who attempt to generate in the child secondary motivational systems related to accomplishment;

(chiliad) the cumulative programming of experiences that provide an appropriate match for the child's current level of cognitive, social, and emotional organization.

Source: Caldwell and Bradley (1984).

The Caldwell HOME inventory

Caldwell and Bradley (1984) accept an operational approach to defining the list of home, environmental, parental, and family characteristics needed to foster the development of the child (table 4.three). While consistent with Belsky'due south concept of the importance of parental personality, this arroyo operationalizes a set of propensities to interact behaviourally with the child in means that are, or are non, conducive to the child's evolution. It then focuses on assessing and intervening on these behaviours and on the contextual support subsystem rather than on the personalities that produce them. Studies linking the HOME to cognitive development have been conducted (Caldwell and Bradley 1984). The two HOME assessment checklists for children, aged 0-3 years, and iii-half dozen years, provide the behavioural variables used in our models. These bank check-listing items, on the 0-3-year scale, are combined into subscales, derived from factor analysis of information from the US reference population, measuring emotional and verbal responsivity, acceptance of the child's behaviour, organisation of the environment, provision of play materials, parental involvement with the child, and opportunities for variety.

The Caldwell HOME inventory has proven a very useful research tool, merely should exist viewed every bit a starting bespeak for more culturally appropriate measures in each developing state setting. A modification of the Caldwell Domicile inventory, along with other culturally appropriate items adamant by rapid appraisement and preliminary qualitative enquiry, could be used with cistron assay to place the relevant factors. Equally an example, in analysing Caldwell Domicile inventory data from Republic of indonesia and Nigeria, we discovered that neither the Indonesian nor the Nigerian Abode information yielded an "acceptance" gene similar to the American data during factor analysis. Moreover, in these cultures the variables in the credence subscale seemed more indicative of parental neglect than of positive parenting (Satoto and Zeitlin 1990; Aina et al. 1992). By dissimilarity, factor analysis on the Indonesian 0-3-year-sometime check-list identified a "community socialization" factor that was apparently not present in the US sample. These analyses sensitized us to the value placed by American civilisation on "acceptance" of what was viewed to exist the child's emerging autonomy, and the fact that our two other cultures did not value autonomy similarly.

Resilience and positive deviance research

Belsky's conclusions regarding the primal importance of parental personality/caregiving behaviours for children are supported past research on psychological resilience and positive deviance. Zeitlin, Ghassemi, and Mansour (1990), reviewing and conducting cross-cultural studies in developing countries on good physical growth and (in fewer studies) good cognitive test performance in the presence of poverty, concluded that children with the near favourable outcomes tend to live in cohesive, supportive, wellspaced, 2-parent families, without major pathologies.

These findings dissimilarity with studies from the United States that controlled for socio-economic status (Cashion 1982), showing that children in female-headed households have good emotional aligning, if they are protected from stigma, and good intellectual evolution comparable to that of other children in studies. In fact, child outcomes were better in a depression-conflict, unmarried-parent household than in a high-conflict, nuclear family (Clingempeel and Reppucci 1982). Parents of children who are positive deviants typically accept superior mental health, life satisfaction related to the child, greater upwards mobility and initiative, and more efficient utilize of health, family planning, and educational services. They display favourable behaviours towards their children, such every bit rewarding accomplishment; giving clear instructions; frequent affectionate physical contact; and consequent, sensitive, and patiently sustained responsiveness to the children's needs (Zeitlin, Ghassemi, and Mansour 1990).

This research provides further empirical evidence for Belsky's determination that the psychological resources of the parents are particularly important in impoverished settings, where the support context and the child's own condition may be fragile or in a negative state.

The family unit both as an entity in itself and as the producer of developmental and welfare outcomes of its members

Perspectives on the family both as an entity and as a producer of developmental outcomes of its members (Kreppner and Lerner 1989) depict it equally a social context or "climate" facilitating the individual's entry into other social contexts and as an environmental factor containing both genetically shared and non-shared components for the developing individual. Research in this area investigates the interplay between sensitive periods in private evolution and family development - e.g. the birth of a child leading to changes in family relationships and structure that in turn affect the child (Kreppner and Lerner 1989). The family is seen as a dynamic context in which the child is both transformer and transformed.

The Schneewind model

Schneewind (1989) provides a psychological model of the family and its effects on children that is supported past empirical work, using an extensive field study of 570 West German families with children aged nine-fourteen years. The model, which Schneewind called "an integrative inquiry model for studying the family system," is the only i nosotros establish that deals quantitatively with the family itself as a organization equally well as with measurable child outcomes that depend on the family organisation, and that clearly specifies causal relationships between factors. Using this model, Schneewind tried to sympathise how and to what extent the "extrafamilial world" is associated with the "intrafamilial world" in the processes of socialization within the family unit.

A full general conceptual framework of the model can be seen in figure 4.6. Socio-economic and demographic variables are used equally contextual variables reflecting the spatial and social organization, and social inequality. These variables stand for the family'southward eco-context for further use. This eco-context is a potential source of stimulating agents that can be used by parents in performing their parental functioning. This potential source is transformed into the actual experience field of both parents and children. The process of transforming the potential into the actual is called the "inner-family socialization activity."

The inner-family socialization activity is divided into three parts:

1. The family unit system level, or the family climate that measures the overall quality of interpersonal relationships within the family;

2. The spouse subsystem level, or the marital relationship;

three. The parent-child subsystem level, or the educational fashion in dicated by parental behaviours and attitudes or authoritarianism.

The family arrangement/climate variables were based on factor analysis of the variables shown in table 4.4, which loaded on 3 factors referred to as positive emotional family climate, stimulating family unit climate, and normativeauthoritarian family climate. We present these variables in particular because their measurement illustrates one arroyo that could be pursued to identify the component parts contributing to the family decision-making/direction capabilities and to the contextual and resources variables contributing to family unit coping that nosotros ultimately seek to define.

Schneewind's applied structural causal modelling used latent variables for hypothesis testing and conception. His model, which served every bit a guide for our own, and its variables are shown in effigy 4.7 and table 4.5. This blazon of modelling, sometimes known by the proper noun LISREL (Jkog and Sm 1989), constructs abstract underlying (latent) variables using gene assay and relates these to measured outcomes. The data supporting the causal model linked extrafamilial (measured past socio-economic condition [SES], urban or rural location, and job experience) and intrafamilial variables (measured past family unit climate, and personal traits of the begetter and the son). The expressive family climate factor (measured by loftier caste of mutual control, intellectual/cultural orientation, active-recreational orientation, and independence) appeared to be an of import mediating factor in the child outcome variable, which was the social adjustment of the son (termed "extraverted temperament"). In another model in the same paper, he demonstrated that low socio-economic eco-context and rigid unstimulating job conditions of the father were associated with an authoritarian parenting style that produced sons with inferiority feelings and weakly internalized locus of command.

Fig. 4.6 An integrative research model for studying family systems in context (source: Schneewind 1989)

Tabular array four.iv Subscales of the family environment scale

Type of dimension	Dimension	Description
Relationship	ane. Cohesion	The degree of commitment, help, and support family members provide for one another
	2. Expressiveness	The extent to which family unit members are encouraged to act openly and to express their feelings directly
	3. Conflict	The amount of openly expressed acrimony, assailment, and conflict amidst family members
Personal growth	4. Independence	The extent to which family members are assertive, are self-sufficient, and make their own decisions
	5. Achievement orientation	The extent to which activities (such as schoolhouse and piece of work) are cast into an achievement-orientated or competitive framework
	6. Intellectual-cultural orientation	The degree of interest in political, social, intellectual, and cultural activities
	seven. Active-recreational orientation	The extent of participation in social and recreational activities
	viii. Moral-religious emphasis	The degree of emphasis on upstanding and religious issues and values
Organization maintenance	nine. Organization	The degree of importance of clear organization and structure in planning family activities and responsibilities
	10. Control	The extent to which gear up rules and procedures are used to run family unit life

Source: Schneewind (1989), after Moos and Moos (1981).

Schneewind constitute that at the aforementioned level of family eco-context are disquisitional differences in the inner-family unit socialization activeness. He concluded that "the psychological makeup of family life ... has an of import influence on how a family unit'due south potential eco-context is really utilized." This is similar to Belsky'due south conclusion that personality and the psychological well-beingness of the parents have the greatest influence on parental performance.

Fig. iv.7 Antecedents and consequences of the family'due south social network (source: Schneewind 1989)

Family social wellness

Measures for the evaluation of family performance provide our major entry point into the study of family social health. Table 4.6 gives a sample of the variety of concepts measured in the subscales of seven instruments used to evaluate family unit functioning (Walker and Crocker 1988). Another fix of instruments can exist found in the coping literature (Krause 1988). Many of the items in tabular array 4.vi are designed to capture positive aspects of social wellness, such as mood and tone, marital satisfaction, happiness, and relationship quality. Only the outset of the instruments, however - the Beavers-Timberlawn family unit evaluation calibration - is based on observed measures, rather than selfreport, and is claimed to be objective, quantifiable, multifactoral, focused on the entire family unit, and relatively simple to administer and score.

Walker and Crocker (1988) conclude that "a global measure of family unit functioning that is well standardized and relatively uncomplicated to administer does not at present be and may never exist developed." We view this perspective every bit overly pessimistic. Rather than looking to create any unmarried measurement tool that serves as a "gold standard," nosotros believe that sensitive apply of qualitative inquiry and rapid assessment methods in developing countries should be able to yield a variety of culture- and situationspecific measures that may be represented by relatively simple indicators for specific inquiry purposes. Such research is actively needed, however, because the investigation of the dimensions of family functioning that are of greatest relevance to international development has however to begin.

Tabular array iv.5 Latent and indicator variables of a causal model on the antecedents and consequences of the family'southward social network

		Gene structure coefficients
		Mother-child	Father- child
Latent variables	No. Description	(n = 570)
I. Eco-context	1. Socio-economic status	.85	.85
	2. Urban location	.62	.58
	iii. Action space density	.51	.48
	4. Location of residence	.34	.41
	v. Period of living in same house/flat	.46	.45
Ii. Extrafamilial activities (parents)	6. Membership in sports and other leisure groups	i.00	1.00
3. Social network (parents)	seven. Intensity of main contacts	.72	.75
	8. No. of telephone contacts	.63	.57
	ix. No. of visiting contacts	.51	.18
	10. No. of good friends	.68	.53
	11. No. of shut families with children	.54	.55
	12. Addressee for educational problems	.44	.57
IV. Expressive family climate	thirteen. Stimulating family climate (second-lodge gene)	i.00	1.00
Five. Child's participation in parents' social network	fourteen. Child's participation in parents' social contacts (composite score)	1.00	i.00
6. Educational style	fifteen. Enhancing child's initiative	.49	.83
	16. Enhancing child's autonomy	.37	.66
	17. Loving back up	.62	.48
	eighteen. Limited verbal advantage	-.sixty	- .23
Vii. Extraverted temperament (child)	19. Will-power	.93	.ninety
	20. Extraversion	.73	.77
VIII. Social activities (kid)	21. No. of telephone contacts	.62	.60
	22. No. of activities in sports groups	.64	.68
	23. No. of hours spent in group activities	.41	.48
	24. No. of extracurricular activities	.73	.74
	25. Social active field of feel (SAFE)	.60	.43

Source: Schneewind (1989).

Table iv.6 Family measure subscales categorized past Fischer's schema ^{a, b}

Measure	Subscale	SD	C and S	Eastward and North	CA	DA
BTFES	Overt ability		x
	Parental coalitions	x
	Closeness			x
	Mythology	ten
	Goal-directed negotiation	x
	Clarity of expression	x
	Responsibility		x
	Invasiveness	ten
	Permeability	x
	Range of feelings			ten
	Mood and tone			10
	Unresolvable conflict	10
	Empathy			10
FACES Ii	Family unit cohesion
	Emotional bonding			x
	Family boundaries	10
	Coalitions	x
	Time	ten
	Space	ten
	Friends			x
	Decision-making	x
	Interests and recreation			x
	Family unit adaptability
	Assertiveness		x
	Leadership (control)		ten
	Subject area		10
	Negotiation	x
	Roles	ten
	Rules		x
FCAM	Consideration versus conflict	x
	Open communication	10
	Togetherness versus separateness	x
	Internal versus external locus of command		x
	Family appearing versus inadequacy			x
	Family unit loyalty			x
	Closeness versus estrangement			x
	Community sociability				x
	Family ambition				x
FES	Cohesion	x
	Expressiveness			x
	Conflict		x
	Independence		ten
	Achievement orientation				x
	Intellectual-cultural orientation				10
	Agile-recreational orientation				ten
	Moral-religious emphasis				10
	Organization	x
	Control		x
FFL	Frequency of disagreement	x
	Communication	x
	Problem solving	x
	Weekends together	ten
	Marital satisfaction			ten
	Happiness			10
FIS	Clarity	x
	Full continuity	x
	Commitment			x
	Understanding and disagreement	10
	Affect intensity			10
	Relationship quality			x
FAD	Problem solving	10
	Communication	ten
	Rules	x
	Affective responsiveness			x
	Affective involvement			ten
	Behaviour command		x

^a. Key to Fischer'due south schema: SD, structural descriptors; C and S. controls and sanctions; E and N. emotions and needs; CA, cultural aspects; DA, developmental aspects.

^b. Source: Schneewind (1989) after Forman and Hagan.

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