Family Life Cycle Theory holds that families progress through stages interrupted by transition points. Critical Transition Theory holds that developmental and situational events disrupt a family's patterned ways of behaving frequently resulting in disorganization and reorganization, that is crisis. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the relationship between critical transitions and coming to therapy. Fifteen clinical and 15 comparison families provided information about the timing of developmental and situational stressor events for three generations of their families. Developmental events included birth and infancy, preschool, schoolage and adolescent transitions. Situational stressors included leaving home, becoming financially self-sufficient, marriage, divorce, births of children, job and career changes, relocation, illness, financial hardship, retirement and death. A computer program was written and used to graph individual life lines with stressor events marked and to sum the total number of stressors for the family in a given year. The families also reported which years they felt had been particularly stressful due to disorganization and restructuring of family rules and roles. In this study three events in a year were used to indicate potential critical transitions. It was hypothesized that families in therapy would have had a critical transition in the previous year whereas this would not hold for control families. An analysis showed no significant relationship between coming to therapy and experiencing a critical transition. It was hypothesized that families' perceptions of disorganization would coincide with the timing of a critical transition. This was found to be true 35 percent of the time. There were no differences between groups in their reporting of periods of disorganization. No differences were found between clinical and control / families in the timing or frequency of stressors, or their perception of periods of family stress and disorganization. Family therapy graduate students found the Family Life Cycle Profile moderately useful as a diagnostic and didactic tool. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 49-03, Section: A, page: 0630. / Major Professor: Mary W. Hicks. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1987.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:fsu.edu/oai:fsu.digital.flvc.org:fsu_76221 |
| Contributors | Deitchman, George Carl., Florida State University |
| Source Sets | Florida State University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text |
| Format | 128 p. |
| Rights | On campus use only. |
| Relation | Dissertation Abstracts International |
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