On Eco-systemic perspectives, it is gradually served as a policy and practical guideline of mental health that local community provides the mentally disabled people with various rehabilitation service as their living base to make them recover social f...
On Eco-systemic perspectives, it is gradually served as a policy and practical guideline of mental health that local community provides the mentally disabled people with various rehabilitation service as their living base to make them recover social function and return to the society. According to this change, it will have an important meaning that the social networks help the mentally disabled people to keep the marriage life within home which is most fundamental in their adjustment to healthy social life. However, the existing literatures related with marriage have been treated in the field of family studies, and it mainly focused only on the internal resources of individual for the factors influencing the marriage, and particularly it is short for the study on the marriage of the mentally disabled people.
Under this background, this study was designed to investigate the marital stability of the mentally disabled people residing in local community, and then to provide a basis to embody the way and role of social welfare intervention by analyzing the effects of social network feature on the marital stability considering the environment system, social networks based on the Eco-system theory. The social networks, the independent variable of this study was categorized as the structural features and functional features, and the former was subdivided into size and contact frequency, the latter was subdivided into support and social conflict in this study. As the study scale, the evaluation scale of Kim In-sook(1994) was used in her review of 'social support scale' of Park Ji-won(1985) that has reliability and validity, and for the scale of social conflict, the scale of Yoo Jo-an(2000) was used as the reorganization of the scale in the study of Rook(1984) and Rauktis et al(1995). And for the scale of the dependent variable, the marital stability, the scale of Choi Yeon-sil(1987) was used in modification of Marital Instability Index(MII) developed by Booth et al(1983).
This study conducted a survey from February 22, 2011 to May 9, 2011 to collect data targeting the mentally disabled people who currently keep marriage(cohabitation) among those using the mental health center and social welfare facility and residing in local community such as Seoul, Gyunggi and Daegu, and then 191 questionnaires were finally analyzed out of 221 returned questionnaires. For the collected data, the hypothesis was verified through the multiple regression analysis, and the study findings is as follows.
First, the larger the size of social networks and the higher the degree of support which the social networks provide, the higher the tendency to keep marriage was. Second, the higher the contact frequency of social networks, and the higher the conflict level which the social networks provide, the less the marital stability was.
Through this study finding, it implied that enough consideration was needed for intervention of improving the qualitative function together rather than unconditional intervention of the quantitative expansion in establishing social networks of the mentally disabled people who reside in local community. Along with this, it proved the importance of exchange with social networks by suggesting that an educational program and intervention plans should be considered through the contact with professional networks, targeting og thatparty or family toward the way of continuing a healthy marriage and improving the problem-solving ability for conflict more than expressing the problems from the marriage life.
This study has its meaning in that it explained the marital stability based on the social networks of the mentally disabled people who reside in local community.