中華心理衛生協會

Purpose: The research is to evaluate how family systems for late adolescents and their families were measured by FACES-TI (a very popularly used inventory by researchers and practitioners). Due to the drastic social change process, traditional family structures have been facing great challenges, which make family interactions more varied and hard to be measured.Method: In order to evaluate how well the inventory measured, both methods of quantitative and qualitative procedures were designed. Based on the quantitative research design, 392 college students were surveyed, the FACES-Ⅱ and the Multi-Individuation Scale devised by the researcher as a validity indicator were administered. Based on the qualitative research design, 36 focus group members were recruited into 6 groups to collect qualitative reactions to FACES-Ⅱ.Results: The research results were presented to answer four questions: (1) What were families reflected from the inventory. (2) What aspect of dimensions were found from the inventory. (3) What theoretical constructs were in dimensions. (4) How did adolescents' perception of family system correlate to their individuation process and their demographic backgrounds. Quantitative data were analyzed by Factor Analysis method to examine major dimensions and factor components within dimensions. And, qualitative data collected from focus groups were analyzed by open coding procedures, and measurement difficulties for some factor components such as ”family boundary”, ”coalitions”, ”family role sharing”, and ”family rules” were presented. Finally, relations among FACES-Ⅱ, multi-individuation process and background variables were analyzed by correlation method.Conclusions: In general, Taiwanese family types tend to be more unbalances than Olson, et al's (1979) sample, whereas the cohesion dimension was underestimated and the adjustment dimension was overestimated. In conclusion, differences between this research results and Olson, et al's (1979) are also discussed with culture perspectives further. At last, the findings will have implications for researchers and practitioners who work with families in Taiwan, and limitations of this research are also discussed.