Family Environment Scale Questionnaire
Thomas
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We examined the degree to which self-deceptive enhancement and/or family environment moderated the relationship between awareness and internalization of sociocultural appearance standards. We administered the Sociocultural Attitudes Towards Appearance Questionnaire, the Family Environment Scale, the Family History of Eating questionnaire, and the Balanced Inventory of Desirable Responding to female undergraduate students (N = 232) and tested our predictions with moderator regression. Self-deceptive enhancement appeared to moderate the relationship between awareness and internalization. Family history of weight and appearance preoccupation also marginally moderated the relationship whereas general family environment did not. High levels of self-deceptive enhancement may serve as a protective factor against internalization of sociocultural pressures. High levels of family preoccupation with weight and appearance may have the opposite effect, making women more vulnerable to internalization.
The FES has been widely used in clinical settings, to facilitate family counseling and psychotherapy, to teach clinicians and program evaluators about family systems, and in program evaluation. It can be used for individual and family counseling, or for research and program evaluation.
Scales
The ninety items of the FES are grouped into ten subscales with three dimensions. Note that entire subscales may be removed to shorten the instrument without affecting validity or reliability.
Family Relationship Index:
Three subscales tap the degree of commitment and support family members provide for one another, the extent to family members are encouraged to express their feelings directly, and the amount of openly expressed anger and conflict among family members.
System Maintenance:
Two dimensions measure the degree of importance of clear organization and structure in planning family activities and responsibilities, as well as how much set rules and procedures are used to run family life.
More about the FES.
The Family Environment Scale (FES) has been widely used in clinical settings, to facilitate family counseling and psychotherapy, to teach clinicians and program evaluators about family systems, and in program evaluation. It can be used to diagnose problems, monitor program changes over time, promote change and program improvement, appraise and improve parenting, strengthen the family unit and the individuals within it, describe, contrast and evaluate the impact of various types of treatment programs, and identify risks.
Available with FES License to Administer:
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To explore the relationship between family environment and depressive symptoms and to evaluate the influence of hard and soft family environmental factors on depression levels in a large sample of university students in China.
Copyright: 2015 Yu et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited
The soft family environment is divided into explicit factors (role of parent example, family regulation and rules, parent educational idea etc) and implicit factors (family culture, parent-child relationship, family member interaction etc). Soft environment is mainly social environment within the family, which has been considered an important factor regarding adolescent mental health [23]. Families operate as one of the major microsystems in creating and maintaining maladaptive behavior through multiple functional processes [24]. Among the soft family environmental factors, cohesion and conflict are the most important in predicting a healthy psychological adjustment for adolescents. Youth depression has been associated with high family conflict [25], low family cohesion [15] and marital discord, particularly marital conflict [14]. Sagrestano et al. reported that depression was related to the family environment in African American adolescents, even when controlling for source bias. Some reports have revealed that family cohesion is the most critical family variable in predicting depression in adolescents [26]. Eaton reported that high levels of negative family expression may have a negative impact on emotionality and emotional regulation [27].
This study aimed to clarify the relationship between hard family environmental factors and depression and to examine the relationship between soft family environmental factors and depression; and to evaluate the function of hard and soft family environmental factors in depression in a large sample of university students living in Harbin, China.
To obtain a representative sample of university students in Harbin, we selected six universities at random. We weighted the distribution of samples from every university by the proportion of students who attended the university. We employed a stratified two-stage cluster selection of university students in full-time study. Then we stratified the sample into four grades (first, second, third and fourth year) and randomly selected classes from these grades. All students from the selected classes were invited to participate in the study. In total, we randomly selected 6,000 students from a total of 274,041 students in Harbin. Six thousand questionnaires were distributed and 5,479 were returned (91.3%). Excluding 239 invalid questionnaires (those with > 20% of the questions unanswered), 5,329 students successfully completed the screening questionnaire (88.8% completion rate). Postgraduate students were excluded, leaving a final number of 4,582 undergraduate students that were analysed statistically. The mean age of the participants was 20.79 years (standard deviation (SD) = 1.507).
The self-designed questionnaire was used to evaluate hard family environmental factors and the socio-demographic variables. The hard family environmental variables included parental relationship, maternal literacy level, family economic status and family intact. The demographic variables included gender, age, grade, ethnicity, religion and the level of satisfaction with the chosen major.
We compared the BDI scores according to different hard family environmental factors (Table 2). The independent t-test showed a significant difference in depressive symptoms between family intact and non-intact groups (p < 0.05). Students in the non-intact family group scored significantly higher than students in the intact family group. ANOVA results showed significant differences between the poor family economic status group and the other groups (p < 0.05). Students with poor family economic status scored highest among the three groups. Parental relationship status significantly affected the BDI scores (p < 0.05); poor parental relationship groups scored higher than moderate and good relationship groups. The BDI scores were also significantly affected by the maternal and paternal literacy level. The higher levels of parental literacy were associated with lower levels of depressive symptoms(p < 0.05).
Among the hard family environmental factors, the strongest indicator of depression was the parent relationship. We found that the worst parent relationship was associated with the higher level of depression. In line with our study, parent marital discord has been consistently regarded as a risk factor of depression in adolescents [20]. Most Chinese families have only three members including two parents and one child. In the event of conflict between parents, the child may more easily exhibit signs of behavioral distress such as sadness, fear, guilt, shame, worry and physiological reactions [34]. Emery et al. reported that marital discord has a more deleterious effect on child functioning than parental divorce or separation [35]. Consistent with their study, we also found that the parental relationship had a greater impact on depression than family structure.
Our findings showed that maternal literacy significantly influenced the depression levels of university students but paternal literacy did not influence. Low parent education with increased risk for depressive symptoms among adolescents was found in several studies [20,36,37,38]. For example, Ibrahim et al. reported that maternal education is a predictor for depression in university students [38]. In a Swedish longitudinal study, Wirback et al. found that the risk of depressive symptoms increased in adolescents whose parents had low education [37].Importantly, Sonego et al. reported that maternal education showed stronger association with depression than did paternal education when parent had a sub-university education [36].The possible explanation for increased risk in university students could be that mothers with a high level of education have good employment opportunities to supplement the family income and are more likely to contribute to a stable financial situation than those with poor education [9]. Moreover, Chinese culture traditionally emphasizes the responsibility of the husband to earn money and the wife to care for the child. In this scenario, mothers have more time to communicate with the child and have a better chance to understand his or her thoughts. Mothers with a higher level of education may be better at communicating with both husband and child, coping with stress and generally creating a harmonious psychological environment in the family. These mothers are prone to paying close attention to the psychological condition of the child and actively communicating with the child, as well as offering better emotional and practical support [39].We also found that some university students may have a higher risk of depression due to the poor economic condition of their families. Students in poor economic conditions routinely experience high levels of chronic stress because of economic problems and may therefore be more vulnerable to psychological issues including depression [3].
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