Family Therapy: An Overview, Essay Example

Quantitative Research Method

An example of a quantitative research method that is applicable to marriage and family therapy is the family environment scale. In this model, family characteristics including a variety of relationship dimensions, personal growth dimensions, and system maintenance dimensions are rated. This consists of 10 characteristic subscales, in which a score from 1 to 100 is obtained for each. A score that represents the average of these 10 characteristics will be used to assess the impact of the family environment on both individual and family functioning (Goldenberg et al., 2013).

The sample selection that occurs for this type of evaluative process involves identifying any family with different levels of functioning. Since this model can be applied to any variety of familial relationships, it would be important for only those with similar family structures to be compared to one another. For example, results would be more meaningful if this scale was used to compare families with only single mothers, rather than comparing two parent families to one parent families. Data collection would involve assessing each family on the basis of their cohesion, expressiveness, conflict, independence, achievement orientation, intellectual-cultural orientation, active recreational orientation, moral-religious emphasis, organization, and control. This would involve rating each family on a scale of 1 to 100 for each trait and averaging their score together. Analysis would involve comparing scores for different families and potentially different family types. This would allow the researcher to draw conclusions pertaining to the stability of different family types based on the aforementioned characteristics.

References

Goldenberg H, Goldenberg I. (2013). Family Therapy: An Overview. Belmont, CA: Brooks/Cole.