Parental alcoholism is a major risk factor for their children's future alcohol abuse and dependence during adulthood. Thus, the purpose of this descriptive phenomenological study was to understand African-American adult female children's perceptions of self-worth, their lived experiences, and their quality of life as it relates to parental alcoholism. The research focus and questions were addressed by applying the conceptual framework of Bowen's family systems and Covington's self-worth theories. Semi-structured interviews were used to collect data from 8 African-American adult female children of alcoholics. Subsequent data analysis and thematic coding were employed by using Colazzi's 7-step method to ensure rigor. The key findings from this study revealed that although over half of the women in this sample experienced some form of abuse and exposure to familial discord and even violence, their self-worth was strengthened by resilience and through forgiveness of their parents and siblings. This study's implications for positive social change include helping researchers and practitioners to better understand parental alcoholism and how it could shape the experiences of offspring, especially in the African-American female ethnic group. Future interventions could be shaped by these findings, and researchers may use these study results as a platform for future work in this literature domain.

One fifth of Sweden's children growing up have under their childhood had at least one parent who had an alcohol use disorder. Children are individually affected in different ways by the circumstances of their upbringing and it is not something that is always apparent to those outside the family circle.  It becomes a dilemma when these children's voices aren't heard. Another compounding factor can be an absence of social support and intervention often carried out by social workers. Social programs adapted to these children’s situation can help break the silence and reach the individuals hiding behind the masks put on to shield off the world outside. We were interested how individuals who had been subjected to having a parent with an alcohol disorder described their experiences and how they felt they had been affected by that circumstance. We wanted to leverage this to reach a deeper understanding of how to better support children living with this situation. This formed the purpose of the of this study and gave rise to the questions investigated. The method employed to conduct the study was a thematic analysis on six swedish autobiographies within this framework. After the autobiographies had been read, four different themes to further investigate emerged: escape from reality, consequences embodied as adults, socioeconomic situation, and relevant social work. Analyses showed that the authors were affected by difficult childhoods impacted by parental alcohol use disorders in a multitude of different ways.  By example, they devised different methods to flee their predicament as children. The results also showed these children could be found in different types of homes and strata across the spectrum of socioeconomic statuses. The now grown children also believed that their childhoods would have been improved if they had had more caring, secure adults in their vicinity to their lives otherwise filled with chaos.

Syftet med denna studie är att undersöka hur skolpersonal på högstadiet upplever sig kunna stärka skyddsfaktorer hos ungdomar som har föräldrar med missbruksproblematik, samt vilken hjälp som finns att ge dessa ungdomar i skolan. Metoden som använts är kvalitativ forskningsansats med inriktning på hermeneutik. För att få fram resultatet har semistrukturerade intervjuer genomförts och transkribering samt meningskoncentrering av materialet gjorts. Resultatet visade på att det finns en hel del hjälpinsatser att ge, exempelvis mentorskontakt, extra läxhjälp och samverkan med socialtjänst och andra myndigheter. Mellan dessa önskas dock en mer öppen sekretess från lärarnas sida för att underlätta arbetet med ungdomarna. Det råder kunskapsbrist hos många lärare kring just missbruksproblematik, och kunskap om detta är någonting som var önskvärt hos flertalet intervjupersoner. Den teoretiska utgångspunkten i studien är relationella perspektivet då denna berör hur viktigt det är med relationen mellan lärare och elev. I resultatet framkom det att relationen är grunden till att eleverna ska må bra, och en positiv relation medför att ungdomarna har det lättare att öppna upp sig och prata om jobbiga situationer.

Studiens syfte var att synliggöra vuxna barns upplevelser av att växa upp med alkoholmissbrukande föräldrar och hur socialtjänsten fanns eller inte fanns som ett stöd under dessa förhållanden. I studien genomfördes fyra kvalitativa intervjuer med vuxna personer som växte upp med föräldrar med alkoholmissbruk och som hade haft kontakt med socialtjänsten. Studiens resultat analyserades med hjälp av Bronfenbrenners utvecklingsekologiska modell, barndomssociologiska begreppen föräldrafiering samt being och becoming och stigmatisering. Studiens huvudresultat belyser att samtliga intervjupersoner påverkades negativt av föräldrarnas alkoholmissbruk. De flesta intervjupersoner upplevde att de behövde ta ett stort ansvar i hemmet och hålla alkoholmissbruket som en familjehemlighet. Resultaten visade att samtliga deltagande var missnöjda med socialtjänstens stöd, exempelvis genom att de inte blev bemötta på ett barns nivå. Ingen familj blev erbjuden familjeorienterade insatser. / The aim of the study was to highlight the experiences of adult children of growing up with alcohol-abusive parents and how the social services were to any support under these circumstances. In the study four qualitative interviews were conducted with adults who grew up with parents with alcohol abuse and who had contact with the social services. The study's results were analyzed by Bronfenbrenner's development ecological model, childhood sociology concepts parentification, being and becoming and the concept stigmatization. The main results of the study, highlights that all interviewees were affected negatively by the parents' alcohol abuse. Most of the interviewees felt that they needed to take great responsibility at home and keep the alcohol abuse as a family secret. The results showed that all participants were displeased with the social services support, for example by not being treated at a child´s level. None of the families were offered family-oriented support.

115 undergraduate students were surveyed to see if attributional style would be different for individuals with alcoholic parents, depressed parents, or neither factor. Subjects were sorted into the three groups based on their responses to a family history questionnaire. Each subject filled out two attributional style questionnaires, the Attributional Style Questionnaire (ASQ) and the Attributional Style Assessment Test (ASAT-II). The three groups did not differ on attributional style for interpersonal, noninter- personal, or general situations. Within the adult children of alcoholics group, subjects reported that their successes in interpersonal situations were due to their strategy and effort, rather than ability, more so than for noninterpersonal successes.

No description available.

The aim of this study was to examine how adult children of parents with substance abuse describe their agency during childhood. The study was conducted by examining podcasts on substance abuse using qualitative content analysis. Eight different podcast episodes were included in which adult children describe their experiences of growing up in a family environment with alcohol and/or drugs. The focus of the analysis was how the adult children position themselves in their story in terms of agency and constraint. The main findings of the study was that the adult children described a range of experiences but with a focus on their vulnerability. The adult children described how they were subjected to uncertainty, neglect and sometimes violence throughout their childhood. At the same time they also positioned themselves as competent agents in their recounts. In their narratives they described how they used different strategies to control their situation and  complex process of disclosure. The strategies were also described as meaningful and used for a specific purpose even though they were sometimes understood as problematic later on. However  the adult children also positioned themselves as powerless in their narratives as they often experienced that their agency was constrained by their subordinated position as a child. An important recurrent experience was that despite their attempts to tell of their situation, it rarely led to a change. The adult children described several barriers to disclosure and how they often felt that nobody listened to them.

Combining psychology literature, social media platforms and collaboration with online communities, this visual communication project explores the experiences and struggles of people that have grown up in dysfunctional households. The intent of this project is to share stories from people who struggle with feeling mentally stuck, in order to fight the stigma surrounding mental health related issues.

Thèse numérisée par la Direction des bibliothèques de l'Université de Montréal.

Educational Studies / M. Ed. (Guidance and Counselling)