Peñalva C

Language: Spanish
References: 22
Page: 32-42
PDF size: 160.73 Kb.

ABSTRACT

It introduces an instrument of evaluation of family functioning within an structural theory developed by Salvador Minuchin and his colleagues and followers. It consists of a “structural interview", of the semi structured type, designed to be used in a low and mediumlow socioeconomic level population. The interview was conformed by 35 questions in a questionnaire exploring the dimensions of family functioning, designed as structure, developmental stage and resonance. They were adapted from a work developed by Szapocznik and his co-workers with the “Family Systems Rating Scale” (SFSR), which includes critic dimensions of limits, alignment and power, from the structural theory. The family evaluation takes into account: a) the answers of the family to the questions of the interviewer; b) the observation of the family behavior during the interview, and c) the observation of the spontaneous transactions of the family. Besides the questionnaire, the instrument includes an evaluation protocol and a manual of qualific ation which includes the description of the variables: family functioning and criteria for the evaluation. The protocol includes various sections of identification, a space for a diagram of the family tree, instructions for the qualification, and a summary of the evaluation criteria of each of the three dimensions. The reliability and validity tests were applied to 25 families: 19 families had children in special education and six families had children in regular education, between first and third grade, at four morning elementary schools and at a psychopedagogic center of the city of Puebla, in Mexico. The kappa reliability inter qualification indexes were: .94 for structure, .72 for developmental stage and .80 for resonance; all there with a level of significance of P ‹ .05. The internal consistency for the global scale, measured with Cronbach’s alpha was .82, and for the dimensions were: .74 (disengagement from the resonance dimension), .71 (enmeshment of the resonance dimension), .65 structure, and .49 developmental stage. Structure had a positive and significative correlation with the developmental stage (r = .58) and with resonance (r = .59); the correlation between the developmental stage and resonance was low (r = .12).A factorial analysis was also performed with Varimax rotation, obtaining four factors which explain 57.5% of the variance. It was concluded that the “structural interview” is useful for evaluating family functioning in similar populations to the ones in which it was applied, but requires further work to improve the qualification system.

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