The purpose of this study is to investigate what effects the positive and negative functions of low-income female single parents' social relation networks on those parents' depression and life satisfaction. Lots of researches that have been made show ...
The purpose of this study is to investigate what effects the positive and negative functions of low-income female single parents' social relation networks on those parents' depression and life satisfaction. Lots of researches that have been made show that female single parents and their family are suffering particular psychological difficulties and problems.
Assistance and support from social resources, especially from people around, are extremely important to make female single parents overcome their psychological problems and make their life healthier. Social relation networks that low-income female single parents have are expected to play a very important role in help those women overcome their trauma and successfully return to society. However, previous studies just made a conclusion that for low-income female single parents, members of their social networks are the very origin of support, ignoring that conflicts among the members may have a negative effect on the women as single parents. In terms of psychological stability, the previous researches focused only on female single parents' depression, just stressing that those women experienced social maladjustment as they became a single parent, in other words, negative consequences from personal incidents like divorce or separation by death.
Low-income female single parents' lives need to be approached in diverse ways. In detail, it is needed to investigate the positive and negative functions of social relation networks to belong which such female single parents, influences of both the functions on those female parents' depression and life satisfaction and further influences of the positive and negative functions of each category of the networks on the two foresaid measures, depression and life satisfaction.
For the investigation, this researcher made a questionnaire survey of low-income female single parents who are referring their children to regional child centers located in Busan. Among all distributed copies of the questionnaire form, 157 were collected and processed through multiple regression and hierarchical regression analyses.
Findings of this study can be summarized as follows.
First, it was found that low-income female single parents were higher in depression when they perceived that their social networks are less positive and more negative in function. In addition, those parents were higher in life satisfaction when their perceived functions of the networks were more positive and less negative. When the networks' positive and negative functions as independent variables were compared, it was found, the latter affected the above mentioned depression as a dependent variable relatively more than the latter while, the former influenced life satisfaction as the other dependent variable relatively more than the latter.
Second, in relation to each category of their social relation networks, low-income female single parents' depression was statistically, significantly correlated with their children and their ex-husband's family, whether the children and the family were positively or negatively functional. Those female single parents' life satisfaction were highly correlated with positive functions of their ex-husband family and both positive and negative functions of their children, friends and other people around.
In conclusion, approaching low-income female single parents' lives in diverse ways requires analyzing all positive and negative functions of their social relation networks. This would contribute to understanding those single parents' life aspects better and in detail.