An empirical study: a model of the pathways between social support, family well being, parenting quality, and child resilience

Abstract

The foreword to the report on the Surgeon General's Conference on Children's Mental Health highlights the crisis-that has been ~reated by the suffering experienced by children with mental health problems and their families (U. S. Public Health Service, 2000). The importance of valuing the families of these youth, building on their strengths, and having available an array of social supports has been widely recognized. Despite this endorsement, little theoretical development or empirical validation has been done that supports the development and strengthening of parental social support in social work interventions. The purpose of this dissertation is to contribute to a conceptual and empirical understanding of the pathways between social support, family well being, quality of parenting, and the development of child resilience in families with a child with serious emotional problems. Based on a review of key concepts and empirical findings within these constructs, a conceptual model and a set of research questions are proposed to describe the transactional relationships between the four domains. The method includes three primary analytic activities (conceptual mapping, scale development, and structural equation modeling) to investigate the validity of the model and the associations between the dependent and independent variables. The findings are that parental social support is significantly and positively correlated with family well being and with quality of parenting. Family well being and quality of parenting are positively associated with child resilience. The model explains 3% to 5% of the variance in child resilience; and family well being is the strongest predictor of child resilience. $ocial support accounts for 6% of the variance in family well being, and social support and family well being account for 54% of the variance in quality of parenting. The study findings empirically validate the protective role of social support in families with a child with serious mental health problems. Social work practice needs to recognize the importance of social support in the practice acts of assessment and intervention. Social work research needs to develop new methods and new measures for understanding the complex relationships among social support, family well being, quality of parenting, and child resilience.