Family Systems - Science topic

@ Rakesh, mainly due to societal ill-health. The increasing cases of murders of live-in partners, news items about family feuds leading to violent attacks on spouses or other family members and suicide among aspiring youths barely in their teens present a scary scenario. There is lack of cohesiveness in the family. Serials and mobiles also assisting it.

Hello Mikayla,

One option would be to reset your variables about each participant as: (a) family size (and give 1..10 as the score); and (b) an aggregate relationship rating, which combines across all of the family members rated. This would allow a cleaner, single-frame analysis. Some information would be lost, vs. tracking each individual family member rating. Another option is to have respondents complete the rating only for the "most important" or "closest" family member. Either approach allows you to use all cases, regardless of the number of family members in the path model (except, of course, those who indicate zero family members).

If you wish to retain the information about individual ratings, then multi-level is about your only choice, as one person's "Relationship with family member 3" is in no way guaranteed to be comparable to another respondent's "Relationship with family member 3." So, treating these as meaningfully distinct (and operationally distinguishable) variables, as in your path diagram, is a real stretch.

You can have Level-2 outcomes in a multi-level model.

Good luck with your work.

Bowen is from Pittsburgh which is not far where I reside. I am quite familiar with his ides.

Family is a crucial social unit. The subsystems are: sibling, parental and marital.

Siblings can have ready access to the parental subsystem but not the marital.

This is triangulation and the clinician must assist the couple to reduce it.

Rich

I agree that the family system plays a vital role for the individual experiencing a neuromuscular disorder. As an occupational therapist, it is crucial to incorporate the family in the goal and discharge planning to design a comprehensive program that prepares the individual with the needed or desired level of functioning for return to their home environment. Unfortunately, it is not uncommon to have a client who does not have sufficient family support to return to their prior environment at the level of function the rehabilitation team anticipates at the end of treatment. In these cases, we pursue other social supports taking into account the level of care required, finances, and the personal preferences and goals of the client. Establishing a solid medical, social, and occupational history during evaluation is vital to facilitate this holistic client-centered care approach. A single discipline can not provide this level of support which is why it is essential to develop strong interdisciplinary teams with efficient lines of communication to works collectively to achieve the best outcomes for the client.

Attached is an excerpt from my dissertation, Comparison of Four Midwest Congregations in Transition of Decision-Making on Same-Gender Marriage Using Bowen Family Systems Theory (Shawnee, KS: Central Theological Seminary, 2020)

I will send you a direct message with a systematic review I have under review currently; these interventions were focused in the U.S. so you would have to see if any have been adapted for Portugese populations. The link below also lists evidence based and promising practices (also U.S. based):

https://www.cebc4cw.org/

Arabs tend to marry relatives more often than most other human populations: this is a 'stylized fact' based on data: http://consang.net/index.php/Global_prevalence. So the question remains: why is this the case?

As you have noted, the notion of socio-economic wealth underpins much of the family business literature. It is often articulated as the relative 'familiness' of the business. This however points to an important point, the extent and use of SEW varies within family businesses. A dichotomy or spectrum of the 'family in business' contrasts the 'family for business' captures the different engagements with SEW.

I am not persuaded that 'performance' is that important or useful. The concept of SEW deals with a quite different sort of performance; the relationships within the family. So key issues, if you want to retain a conceptually coherent framework, might be aspects such as satisfaction, enjoyment whilst working in the family firm. I am proposing psychic rewards and internal rather than extrinsic measures of say financial performance are more relevant and logical for this framework.

I am not familiar with Bowen's theory, so cannot comment on that. However, it is worth keeping in mind that family is the basic unit of social organisation. Moreover, it used to be the basic unit of economic organisation.

Finally, I think Leonadis' comment is wrong. In the family business and entrepreneurship literature emotions are an important part of what we study. Probably he has been looking in the wrong literature.

Hi All, thanks so much for the input. I have 5 participants for my research and after much consideration and advice I am going to use IPA with a view to bringing in multiple frames of understanding including a narrative lens amongst other lenses, e.g systemic, social constructionist, attachment etc. as a means of understanding. Hopefully there will be something interesting to share after all the hard work has been graded.

and parental gender role conservatism may be the important issue

Hi Mariana,

We assess multiple facets of coregulation, including synchrony as Ruth mentioned, and also temporal coordination (concurrent and time-lagged), flexibility/rigidity, contingency, repair processes, and entropy. We use dynamic and dyadic time series analytic methods to capture these processes - in the domains of emotion, expressed affect, goal-directed behavior, and physiology. I observe these processes during unstructured and experimental parent-child tasks in the laboratory, such as free play, clean-up, and puzzle/problem-solving tasks. Please see Lunkenheimer, Kemp, Lucas-Thompson, Albrecht, & Cole (2017) for a paper dedicated to the issue of how to measure parent-child coregulation in early childhood.

I also work with Elizabeth Skowron who explicitly applies a Bowenian framework, so you may want to check out her research as well.

Best,

Erika

You might find this review of a New Zealand Court of Appeal decision useful, or at least food for thought.

The National Scientific Council on the Developing Child is a working group based at Harvard doing extensive work in examining resilience for adverse childhood events in general.  This includes the chaotic home environments that can be experienced by children of parents with substance use issues, rather than specific adverse experiences.  The research focuses on the mechanisms of resilience and how to promote resilience in children; however, the findings are equally relevent for adults.  

Individuals need strong social interaction, coping and stress management skill sets, as well as warm, supportive relationships to navigate life and thrive. Individuals growing up in homes with substance abuse and many other parental challenges often do not receive adequate warmth and nurturing within their family of origin because of the ways that parental substance use alter family systems.  Adaptive social interaction and coping skills are frequently absent in adult children of substance users as well, as the opportunities to learn those skills from parents can be infrequent or absent.  

Through supportive mentoring relationships through work, education, softball leagues, what have you, as well as counseling and various other experiences adults can build these skills and capacities over time and be resilient.

Thanks so much for all of the feedback, information, tips, & links! ~ Jenelle

We actually translate the ambiguous loss scale into the German language, and validate it. In case of severe alcoholism, the term ambiguous loss certainly is justified. My best, Philipp