The relationship of family structure and family conflict to adjustment in young adult college students

Adolescence, Spring, 1993 by Wendy L. Nelson, Honore M. Hughes, Paul Handal, Barry Katz, H. Russell Searight

The relationship between family structure and child adjustment has been widely studied. The literature on divorce of the past 50 years contains dozens of studies of the relationship between family structure and various measures of child adjustment and psychological health. Some of the more frequently examined constructs include self-concept and self-esteem (Berg & Kelly, 1979; Boyd, Nunn, & Parish, 1983; Johnson & Hutchinson, 1988; Kanoy, Cunningham, White, & Adams, 1984; Landis, 1962; Parish & Dostal, 1980; Parish & Nunn, 1981; Parish & Parish, 1983; Raschke & Raschke, 1979; Saucier & Ambert, 1986; Schnayer & Orr, 1988), academic performance (Dancy & Handal, 1984; Guidubaldi, Cleminshaw, Perry, Nastasi, & Lightel, 1986; Hess & Camara, 1979; Landis, 1962; Saucier & Ambert, 1986), social adjustment (Enos & Handal, 1986; Guidubaldi et al., 1986; Heath & Lynch, 1988; Landis, 1962), ego identity (Grossman, Shea, & Adams, 1980), family concept (Isaacs & Levin, 1984; Rozendal, 1983), and general psychological adjustment and well-being (Cooney, Smyer, Hadestad & Klock, 1986; Dancy & Handal, 1984; Enos & Handal, 1986, 1987; Hetherington, Cox, & Cox, 1985; Kulka & Weingarten, 1979; Lopez, Campbell, & Watkins, 1988; Pett, 1982; Rosen, 1979; Wallerstein, 1985; Wallerstein & Kelly, 1979). In general, the results of these studies have been inconclusive. The discrepant findings of many of these studies may be due to a number of factors: poor study design, study instruments of questionable reliability and validity, differences in the demographics of the study populations, differences in subject recruitment, and different statistical analytic techniques. In addition, because many studies of divorced, single-parent families fail to include a comparison cohort of intact and/or reconstituted families, as well as fail to address the issue of sample size, Type II error is a potential problem.

In 1957, Nye suggested that the crucial factor in child adjustment was the "sociopsychological success or failure of the family" rather than its structural intactness. He observed that adolescents from "broken" homes (i.e., those who did not live with their original parents) "show less psychosomatic illness, less delinquent behavior, and better adjustment to parents than do adolescents from unhappy unbroken homes," and concluded that the traditional view of broken homes needed to be reconsidered. The idea that perceived unhappiness in the family was a potentially important correlate of adjustment was further investigated by Landis (1960, 1962), who found that an unhappy marriage was more disturbing to children than divorce. In a study of college students from divorced families, Landis (1960) reported that of the students who could remember what their home life was like prior to divorce, those who remembered their homes to be happy experienced more trauma than did those who saw their homes as characterized by parental conflict. Building on the work of Nye and Landis, Raschke and Raschke (1979) investigated the possible interactive effects of family structure and perceived family conflict on children's self-concept. One of the major conclusions of their study was that family structure was not associated with self-concept; rather, self-concept appeared to be related to perceived family conflict.

Emery (1982) studied the relationship between marital turmoil and child behavior, and proposed that "interparental conflict, not separation, may be the principal explanation for the association found between divorce and continuing childhood problems." This view was further developed by Dancy and Handal (1984), Enos and Handal (1986), and Slater and Haber (1984), whose work lends support to the psychological-wholeness model. This model views family conflict as the crucial variable affecting child adjustment. In contrast, the physical-wholeness model views divorce and the physical disruption of the intact family unit as the critical variable.

In the psychological literature, there is no universally accepted definition of "adjustment." In fact, adjustment has become such a widely used term that few authors even consider defining it. Much of the literature on divorce has focused on some aspect of child adjustment. Each study contains a unique perspective on the meaning of adjustment. Farber, Primavera, and Felner (1983) conceptualized adjustment to parental divorce as the "adaptation" to the "life transition" of divorce, and assessed adjustment in terms of the child's behavioral and emotional difficulties. In a subsequent study (Farber, Felner, & Primavera, 1985), post-divorce adjustment in adolescents was assessed by measures of anxiety, depression, hostility, and self-concept. For many authors, adjustment is somewhat recursively defined by the instruments used to measure it. Because there is no agreed-upon definition of adjustment, the term has been used rather loosely and nonspecifically in the psychological literature.

Interestingly, few researchers have attempted to study adjustment from a developmental, theoretical perspective, such as proposed by Erikson (1980). According to Erikson, the major psychosocial task of adolescence is identity formation. This core conflict, identity vs. identity diffusion, falls between the major crisis of the school-age child, industry vs. inferiority, and the major crisis of young adulthood, intimacy vs. isolation. Failure to resolve the identity issues of adolescence may lead to difficulty in establishing true intimacy in adulthood. Erikson defined ego identity as "the awareness of the fact that there is a selfsameness and continuity to the ego's synthesizing methods and that these methods are effective in safeguarding the sameness and continuity of one's meaning for others". Marcia (1966, 1980) operationalized Erikson's ego identity construct by developing four identity status profiles: identity achievement, identity moratorium, identity foreclosure, and identity diffusion. These were defined with respect to decision making in the ideological and occupational domains. Persons in identity achievement were distinguished by having experienced a crisis, during which they considered occupational and ideological alternatives, and subsequently having set occupational and ideological goals. At the opposite end of the spectrum were persons in identity diffusion. These individuals may or may not have undergone a crisis, and had not committed themselves to any ideological or occupational goals. Between these extremes were persons in moratorium and foreclosure. The former were distinguished by being in crisis, grappling with occupational and ideological issues. They had not yet fully committed themselves. Persons in foreclosure had not experienced a personal crisis but had made stable commitments nonetheless. These individuals tended to adopt the beliefs and commitments of others, particularly parents, without questioning their meaning.