Family resilience is a relatively new concept, which describes how family members can adapt to stress and bounce back from adversity. Families with a chronic disease child have some qualities that allow them to resolve their problems and survive the ...
Family resilience is a relatively new concept, which describes how family members can adapt to stress and bounce back from adversity. Families with a chronic disease child have some qualities that allow them to resolve their problems and survive the difficult situation, one of which is family resilience. This powerful quality can help the family members relieve the stress and aid them to adapt to their inevitable hard circumstances.
This study focuses on the family resilience, which is one of the strongest benefits among those qualities. The purpose of this study is to find out that this quality relieves the stress of chronic illness child families, and to prove that family adaptation is influenced by the quality in an affirmative way.
The projects to achieve the aim of the study are
First, to find out whether there are families which have intensive family resilience among chronic illness child families.
Second, to find out whether the stress of chronic illness child families have relation with family adaptation, and what is the characteristic of the relation, if any.
Third, to find out whether the family resilience of chronic illness child families has relation with family adaptation, and what is the characteristic and the amount of the relation, if any.
Fourth, to find out whether family stress has relation with family resilience, and what is the characteristic and the amount of the relation, if any.
Fifth, to find out how and how much these three factors -family stress, family resilience, and family adaptation- affect one another.
This study applied data out of the survey of 202 families with chronic illness child and 240 families with common child. The survey tools utilized the stress, hardiness, cohesion, problem solving communication, crisis evaluation, health inquiry, and adaptation of families.
The methods for analyzing the results are frequency analysis, mean analysis, one way Anova, Pearson's correlation, SPSS 10.0 for multiple regression analysis, and AMOS 4.0 for path analysis.
The major findings are as follows.
1. There exist some families which have intensive family resilience, in spite of family adversity coming out from taking care of chronic illness child. But there is no meaningful difference between chronic illness child families and common ones about the family resilience.
2. Family stress have some negative influence on family resilience and family adaptation. Chronic illness child families have intensive family stress, and showed a meaningful difference, compared with common child family.
3. Family resilience of chronic illness child families has meaningful cause-and-effect relation with family adaptation. Also, subordinate factors of family resilience influences positively on family adaptation.
4. Family resilience leads to the family adaptation in the process of decreasing stress.
In conclusion, this study confirms that family resilience affects family adaptation in a cause-and-effect way, and buffers the adversity of chronic illness child families. The result of this study will be able to provide some practical and theoretical implications to the social workers and professions helping chronic illness child families.