Families' Schemata of Social Relationships

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An empirical examination of the degree of association of dimensions elicited by two family assessment instruments is presented. There were no associations among dimensions whose descriptors suggested a good amount of similarity. The results strongly suggest additional study of correspondence among assessment methods that appear to tap similar family properties, with particular attention directed to the correspondence between self-report and direct observational procedures.

Section: Areas Of Potential Association Between the Instrumentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Family Concepts and Their Measurement: Things Are Seldom What They Seem

Oliveri

Reiss

1984

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“…Clinical experience as well as empirical investigations (Gehring & Schultheiss, 1987, Gerber, 1977, Kuethe, 1962, Madanes, Dukes, & Harbin, 1980, Oliveri & Reiss, 1982) suggest that people are able to give a spatial representation of important interpersonal relationships, and that these representations can differentiate between normal families and families of children with various kinds of physical or psychosocial problems (learning disability, heroin addiction, psychosomatic disorders).…”

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confidence: 99%

“…Family members have been asked to represent family characteristics by means of a variety of techniques: placing two‐dimensional paper (Gerber, 1977) or felt figures (Kuethe, 1962, Oliveri et al ., 1982, stick figures (Madanes et al ., 1980) or circles (Schmid, Rosenthal, & Brown, 1988, or three‐dimensional figures (Cromwell, Fournier & Kvebaek, 1980, Gehring et al ., 1987, Kvebaek, 1973) on a sheet of felt, paper, or a board. However, this proliferation of procedures and material and the lack of standardized scoring procedures have hindered generalization and comparison of findings across studies.…”

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confidence: 99%

A Computerized Scoring Procedure for the Kvebaek Family Sculpture Technique Applied to Families of Children with Rheumatic Diseases

Eckblad

Vandvik²

1992

A new computer-based quantification procedure was applied to data obtained from administering the Kvebaek Family Sculpture Technique (KFST) to 92 mothers of children with recent onset of rheumatic symptoms (median = 7 months). Four family configuration types (close, hierarchical, unspecified, and skewed) were defined on the basis of distance and structural parameters of the configuration. The types differed with regard to the childhood environment of the mother, chronic family difficulties, and the psychosocial functioning of the primary patient. Comparisons of the families of the mothers that did (n = 23) and did not (n = 69) wish a change of family configuration showed that the families of the mothers who wished change differed with regard to configuration types, distance variables, and psychosocial characteristics. The results are discussed in the context of structural family-systems theory. The computerized scoring procedure opens new possibilities for research about various family members' perspectives and assessment of changes in family configurations during therapy or over time.

“…For example, in clinical settings the dimensions have predicted a family's adjustment to a family‐oriented inpatient service (38), a family's perception of other families in a multiple family group (37), and the family's role in the course of patients on renal dialysis (unpublished data). Regarding more everyday phenomena, the dimensions have predicted the family's experience of strangers (27) and its ties to kin (25).…”

Section: Three Dimensions Of the Family Paradigmmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sensory Experience and Family Process: Perceptual Styles Tend to Run in but Not Necessarily Run Families

Reiss

Oliveri

1983

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The science of family systems has begun to develop concepts and methods for objectively assessing important characteristics of families. Thus we now have ways of measuring differences among families with respect to cohesiveness, flexibility, clarity of communication, and shared views of social reality. We know practically nothing, however, about the origins of these differences among families. One possibility is that the skills or personal attributes of one or more individual members influences the characteristics of the family as a whole. This paper explores the hypothesis that the perceptual styles of individual members--the ways they organize their experience of their personal stimulus world--influence the shared perceptions the family develops of the social world in which it lives. We explored relationships between nine measures of perceptual style and problem-solving measures of the family's shared perception of its social world. The findings showed many similarities among members of the same family on several measures of perceptual style. However, perceptual style had only a few relationships with family performance in the problem-solving task.