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

Other than the work of Grossman, Shea, and Adams (1980), there is little in the literature that addresses adolescent identity formation among children from intact and nonintact families. The purpose of the present study was to extend the scope of previous research on the relationship between family structure and family conflict to young adult adjustment by using a measure of ego identity formation. For the purpose of this study, an intact family was defined as one in which the biological or adoptive parents lived together. A nonintact family was defined as one in which the biological or adoptive parents did not live together, either as a result of divorce, separation, or death. Nonintact families included single-parent families (divorced-not remarried and widowed-not remarried) and reconstituted families (divorced-remarried and widowed-remarried). Using family structure (intact/nonintact) and perceived level of family conflict (high, middle, and low conflict) as independent variables, ego identity status and psychiatric symptom status were examined as dependent measures. The physical-wholeness position would be supported if individuals from intact and nonintact families differed on measures of adjustment. The psychological-wholeness position would be supported if conflict rather than family structure was associated with adjustment.

METHOD

Subjects

Two hundred eighty-five undergraduate students were recruited from undergraduate classes at two Midwestern liberal arts colleges located in the same metropolitan area. Participants ranged in age from 17 to 24 years, and included 208 (73%) females and 237 (83%) students of Caucasian background. Sixty-two percent of the participants identified themselves as Catholic, 23% as belonging to another Christian denomination, and 15% indicated that they had another or no religious affiliation. Two hundred twenty-four participants (79%) were from intact families, 52 (18%) were from families in which there had been a divorce or separation, and 9 (3%) were from families in which a parent had died or the parents had never married. Eighty-eight participants (31%) were from families perceived as low conflict, 180 (63%) from families perceived as middle conflict, and 17 (6%) from families perceived as high conflict.

Materials

Assessment of family conflict. Family conflict was assessed by the Conflict subscale of the Family Environment Scale (FES) (Moos & Moos, 1986). The FES is a rationally derived, 90-item, true-false measure of family climate which has been called "the most widely accepted measure of family climate" (Kleinman, Handal, Enos, Searight, & Ross, 1989). Several investigators have used the FES to study the relationship between adolescent perception of family climate and adjustment. The nine-item Conflict subscale assesses "the amount of openly expressed anger, aggression, and conflict among family members" (Moos & Moos, 1986). Using the Conflict subscale, Kleinman et al. (1989) developed and validated cutoff scores for high-, middle-, and low-conflict families. High conflict was defined as more than one standard deviation above the mean; low conflict was defined as more than one standard deviation below the mean; and middle conflict was defined as within one standard deviation of the mean. The internal consistency (Cronbach's alpha) of the Conflict subscale is .75, and the two-month test-retest reliability is .85. Extensive information about the FES normative sample, reliability, and validity is provided in the FES manual (Moos & Moos, 1986).