There is currently a lack of reliable scales with which to assess the construct of family quality of life, particularly for families who have children with disabilities. The current work presents 2 ...studies, including a total of 488 families with children with disabilities, which were conducted to complete the development of a scale to assess family quality of life. The measure was refined through confirmatory factor analyses into 25 items that assess 5 domains of Family Quality of Life: Family Interaction, Parenting, Emotional Well-Being, Physical/Material Well-Being, and Disability-Related Support. Each subscale was found to be unidimensional and internally consistent. An initial examination of test-retest reliability and convergent validity is also presented. Implications for future research, scale use, and policy are discussed.
Certain events in one's life, such as marriage, joining the workforce, and growing older, can become important determinants of political attitudes and voting choice. Each of these events has been the ...subject of considerable study, but in The Politics of Parenthood, Laurel Elder and Steven Greene look at the political impact of one of life's most challenging adult experiences—having and raising children. Using a comprehensive array of both quantitative and qualitative analyses, Elder and Greene systematically reveal for the first time how the very personal act of raising a family is also a politically defining experience, one that shapes the political attitudes of Americans on a range of important policy issues. They document how political parties, presidential candidates, and the news media have politicized parenthood and the family over not just one election year, but the last several decades. They conclude that the way the themes of parenthood and the family have evolved as partisan issues at the mass and elite levels has been driven by, and reflects fundamental shifts in, American society and the structure of the American family.
This open access book brings together a unique set of comparative data from Western and Central Europe on how contemporary families live, and discusses the similarities and differences in family ...lifestyles in this region. The empirical data comes from the authors' original research derived from adult representatives of families with children in the Czech Republic, Germany, Latvia, Poland, Slovakia and Ukraine. The authors compare and interpret information on the social and economic situation of families, expressed satisfaction in their lifestyles, and leisure and media in the everyday life of families. Overall, the authors bring into the discussion both current knowledge and original empirical data on families and contribute to literature on the sociology of the family, particularly in Europe. This book is useful to researchers and students interested in family issues, along with professionals in the field of family care and social policy.
The construct, family resilience, has been defined and applied very differently by those who are primarily clinical practitioners and those who are primarily researchers in the family field. In ...this-article, the family resilience perspective is integrated with conceptual definitions from family stress theory using the Family Adjustment and Adaptation Response (FAAR) Model in an effort to clarify distinctions between family resiliency as capacity and family resilience as a process. The family resilience process is discussed in terms of (a) the meaning of significant risk exposure (vs. the normal challenges of family life) and (b) the importance of making conceptual and operational distinctions between family system outcomes and family protective processes. Recommendations for future family resilience research are discussed.
Offspring Bulatao, Rodolfo A; Wachter, Kenneth W
03/2003
eBook
Open access
Despite recent advances in our understanding of the genetic basis of human behavior, little of this work has penetrated into formal demography. Very few demographers worry about how biological ...processes might affect voluntary behavior choices that have demographic consequences even though behavioral geneticists have documented genetics effects on variables such as parenting and divorce. Offspring: Human Fertility Behavior in Demographic Perspective brings together leading researchers from a wide variety of disciplines to review the state of research in this emerging field and to identify promising research directions for the future.
Noting a phenomenon that might seem to recall a previous era, The New York Times Magazine recently portrayed women who leave their careers in order to become full-time mothers as “opting out.” But, ...are high-achieving professional women really choosing to abandon their careers in order to return home? This provocative study is the first to tackle this issue from the perspective of the women themselves. Based on a series of candid, in-depth interviews with women who returned home after working as doctors, lawyers, bankers, scientists, and other professions, Pamela Stone explores the role that their husbands, children, and coworkers play in their decision; how women’s efforts to construct new lives and new identities unfold once they are home; and where their aspirations and plans for the future lie. What we learn—contrary to many media perceptions—is that these high-flying women are not opting out but are instead being pushed out of the workplace. Drawing on their experiences, Stone outlines concrete ideas for redesigning workplaces to make it easier for women—and men—to attain their goal of living rewarding lives that combine both families and careers.
War and terrorism are exerting increasing force on world affairs, with growing implications for families and the scholars who study them. In this review, I consider the implications of mass violence ...for families, with particular emphasis on families with members serving in the U. S. military and families around the world who live where mass violence occurs. Mass violence poses significant threats to mental health and family functioning, but individuals and families also display striking levels of resilience.
Affective organizational commitment is an important predictor of the willingness to contribute to organizational goals and is of particular relevance to family firms, as these firms often rely on ...long-term involvement of family members through transgenerational succession. Drawing on organizational commitment and ownership attachment theories, we probe the influence of family firm dynamics (i.e., family harmony and relationship conflict) on work-family conflict and family owner-managers' ownership attachment, which in turn impact affective organizational commitment. On the basis of a study of 326 family firms, we introduce ownership attachment as an important antecedent to affective organizational commitment. We find that ownership attachment is positively affected by both family harmony and work-family conflict, whereby work-family conflict is influenced by relationship conflict. We also find that work-family conflict affects ownership attachment.
The Batterer As Parent Bancroft, R. Lundy; Silverman, Jay G; Ritchie, Daniel
2011, 2012, 2011-09-14
eBook
Moving beyond the narrow clinical perspective this book offers a view that takes into account the complex ways in which a batterer′s abusive and controlling behaviors are woven into the fabric of ...daily life.
The 2002 exchange on ambivalence in the Journal of Marriage and Family (Vol. 64, No. 3), published under the editorship of Alexis Walker, prompted an impressive array of research on family ties, in ...particular intergenerational relationships. Following a discussion of the concept's theoretical underpinnings, the author argues that advancing the concept of ambivalence rests on realizing its multilevel potential by addressing the interplay of shifting contradictions experienced by individuals and in relationships and embedded in social institutions and in macro-level arrangements and processes. She considers progress and limitations in a critical review of predominant applications of ambivalence and then investigates research that advances ambivalence as a bridging concept across multiple levels of analysis. Work on atypical family ties, dependency, contradictory cultural expectations due to migration and social change, families and the welfare state, and on climate change and disability promotes the multilevel potential of ambivalence and points to ways to advance its promise in theory and practice.
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