Психология и Психотерапия Семьи (May 2017)
What are balanced and unbalanced families in the perception of Russian adolescents in comparison to American, French, and South Korean families with adolescents
Abstract
Specialists working in the field of modern family study and support still have few really useful, well-structured and standardized measurements for their research. D. Olson's FACES, exploring structural family characteristics, is one of the few we can use here. In this article, we aim to apply Olson's method to the investigation of families with adolescents in Russia. Standardized norms for this age group were obtained from this study, which also made it possible for us to compare them with 1) norms for other age groups in so-called "balanced" and "unbalanced" families (groups of children of age 3-7 and age 12) 2) with the norms of such groups in other countries – USA, France and South Korea (our main goal). We show that there is a measurable difference in perceiving «real» and «ideal» families as balanced or unbalanced among culturally different groups of adolescents. Standards that we have obtained for Russian adolescents show that their real families, as well as the families they would like to have, are in the zone that may be considered "dysfunctional" in the wider context of world standards. This raises a lot of questions and calls for further investigation.
