THE CORRELATES OF HEALTHY FAMILY FUNCTIONING: THE ROLE OF CONSENSUS AND CONFLICT IN THE PRACTICE OF FAMILY THERAPY

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Abstract
The present study explores the relative importance of individual, dyadic and triadic measures of intrafamily functioning in predicting family health. Using self‐report data from 78 families, it was found that dyadic measures pertaining to marital quality and parent‐child relationships were more powerful predictors than either individual measures of emotional maturity, anxiety, self‐esteem or locus of control, or triadic measures of the families' hierarchical alignments. The study also found that while mothers' and fathers' assessments of intrafamily functioning were more important than the childrens' (except for the childrens' view of parent‐child relationships), the parents differed in that marital quality was more important to the mothers' evaluations of the family unit while parent‐child relationships were more important to the fathers'. Compositely, the findings suggest that family health is a complex multidimensional phenomenon, and that change in a particular dimension of family life may not necessarily be greeted with consensual validation or repudiation by all family members.

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