The Role of Family and Marital Communication in Developing Resilience to Family-of-Origin Adversity

ABSTRACT

To explain recovery from adverse experiences, researchers have focused on resilience as a process occurring within individuals. This study extends existing research by positioning resilience as an interpersonal process in which people communicatively interpret and respond to adversity. Married participants who experienced significant adversity in their family of origin (n = 193) reported on their familial and marital communication and personal characteristics. Overall, resilience was influenced by the unique and combined influences of individual, marital, and family factors. Individuals’ optimism and efficacy emerged as predictors of resilience, and communicated support from a marital partner was particularly important for those lower in optimism. People from families with a balance of cohesion and flexibility and strong communication were more resilient, regardless of the amount of adversity they experienced. In unbalanced families, supportive marital communication served in a compensatory role to promote resilience to family of origin adversity.

Notes

¹ Percentages total more than 100% because participants were able to indicate that they had experienced more than one type of family adversity.

² A circumplex ratio score was computed for each individual that summarizes the “level of functional verses dysfunctional behavior perceived in the family system” (FACES IV, 2010, p. 17). To do so, the two scores from each of the unbalanced measures were individually summed and divided by two to obtain an average unbalanced score for each dimension of cohesion and flexibility. Participants’ balanced scores for cohesion and flexibility were then divided by their calculated average unbalanced score for the corresponding dimension, resulting in one ratio score for cohesion, and one ratio score for flexibility. To obtain each participant’s total circumplex ratio, the cohesion ratio was added to the flexibility ratio and the sum was divided by two. Ratio scores falling below one indicate increasingly unbalanced families, whereas ratio scores above one indicate increasingly balanced families.