The Relationship between Family Structure and Adolescents' Social Adjustment in Taipei City
Journal
臺大社會工作學刊
Journal Issue
5
Pages
197-270
Date Issued
2001
Author(s)
Abstract
For children, family life experience is significantly related to their physical, psychological, and cognitive development. However, parental obscene, as a result of divorce, death, or unwedded, has become a more common incidence happened in family than before for the past twenty years in Taiwan. Children in single parent families are reported to experience more troubles and difficulties in social adjustment process than children in two parent families. Past studies indicated that family structure change was detrimental to children development in terms of unfavorable social adjustment. But other studies pointed out that disadvantaged conditions implied in single parent families, such as low parental support, less time spent together, few social resources, and lack of peer relationship, contributed more to the poor performance in social adjustment. The study intends to examine what mechanism accounts more for the unfavorable social adjustment among children in early adolescent period. Based on cluster random sampling, a class interview using a structured questionnaire was conducted to collect related data from school children between 10 and 14 in Taipei City. Considering the biased estimation on extremely smaller sample of single parent familiar, 64 oversamples from agencies were added to the sample. As a total, 759 children were sampled for statistical analysis. Results indicated that social adjustment process was related to multiple dimensions of school children's life. And, parental abs cense had differentiated effects on children's life, depending on what dimension of adjustment referred to. Overall, the effect of parental absence only works on social aspect of children's adjustment, but not other dimensions. Children's adjustment was accounted for more by the social bonds and economic resources interweave in familial and school settings. Lastly, implications for family, school, and welfare policy are included.
Type
journal article