Impact of family type on resilience

Pages:17-20
Lokesh Gupta and Rajbir Singh (Department of Psychology, M. D. University, Rohtak, Haryana)

Resilience is the positive capacity of people to cope With stress, the ability to bounce back to homeostasis after a disruption. It is an •adaptive system that uses exposure to stress to provide resistance to future negative events. Resilience, thus, corresponds to cumulative “protective factors”. American Psychological Assosiation (APA) suggests that maintaining good relationships with close family members , friends and others is the way to build resilience. In the current study, type of family at the time of childhood (0-10 years) is taken as a predictor to develop resilience in a person. The sample of 176 males was divided into two different groups, namely, young adults (Age 21-30years) and middle age adult (3 l-40years). These two groups were further divided into three subgroups on the bases of types of family: Joint-Joint (J-J), Joint-Nuclear (J-N) and Nuclear-Nuclear (N-N). Resilience Scale by Wagnild and Young (1993) was used to measure resilience . The main purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between type of family and resilience building in a person. The study, however, also attempts to verify the moderating role of resilience in the relationship between family background and well-being. Joint family system prvides inbuilt mechanism of social support of both ways, i.e., giving and seeking besides was buffers the stress etc. The obtained data were analyzed by Analysis of Variance and it was found that middle age adult Joint-Nuclear family had better resilience. At the Young Adult age level a person with an experience of joint family and now he living in nuclear family or single showed lesser score on resilience in comparison to all other subgroups.