Associations between dyadic relationship quality and stepfamily functioning: A common fate modeling approach.

Clinical and empirical literatures have highlighted the value of attending to distinct dyads within stepfamilies to ensure the needs of various relationships are being met. From a family systems perspective, the growth and maintenance of positive dynamics within one dyadic relationship can yield gains in other relationships and shape the larger stepfamily environment. Research seeking to link information about dyads and larger stepfamily systems is often marked by single-informant data or measures that represent individual-level constructs.

Attitudes About Forgiveness and Leaving a Relationship: The Context of Relationship Aggression.

The present study examines participant attitudes regarding whether a victim of IPV should forgive an offending partner and whether they should stay or leave a violent relationship. A total of 562 participants completed the study, which entailed responding to factorial vignettes online. Participants were primarily heterosexual, female, non-Latino, and White, with an average age of 21.

Uncovering Family Treatment Decision-Making Processes: The Value and Application of Case Study Methods to Family Research.

Research on how and why family processes influence phenomena is essential to advancing many areas of science. Case study methods offer an approach that overcomes some of the sampling and analysis obstacles researchers face when studying families. This article aims to illustrate the benefits of case study methods for studying complex family processes using an example from treatment decision-making in sickle cell disease.

Attitudes About Intimate Partner Violence and Alcohol Consumption.

This mixed methods study analyzed individual attitudes regarding how the gender of an aggressor, levels of aggression (i.e., slapping, punching, or threatening with a weapon), and alcohol consumption (i.

Stepparents' Attachment Orientation, Parental Gatekeeping, and Stepparents' Affinity-Seeking with Stepchildren.

Remarried stepfamilies are a sizable portion of American families; in a 2011 Pew Center survey, 42% of respondents reported at least one stepfamily member. Family clinicians and researchers suggest that stepparents' ability to develop close bonds with stepchildren may be critical to the well-being of couple and family relationships. Using actor-partner interdependence models to analyze dyadic data from 291 heterosexual remarried stepfamily couples, we explored factors related to stepparents' efforts to befriend their stepchildren.

Stepfathers' affinity-seeking with stepchildren, stepfather-stepchild relationship quality, marital quality, and stepfamily cohesion among stepfathers and mothers.

Because of the potential stepparent-stepchild relationships have for tension and conflict, clinicians have identified the development of a positive stepparent-stepchild connection as one of the major tasks of stepfamily life. Stepparents often are advised to focus initially on developing friendships with stepchildren, or seeking affinity with them, particularly early in the life of the relationship. Both family systems theory and evolutionary theory suggest that stepparents' affinity-seeking behaviors are related to the quality and functioning of other stepfamily dyads, such as couple relationships, and the whole stepfamily.

A comparison of stepgrandchildren's perceptions of long-term and later-life stepgrandparents.

Background: Multi-generational steprelationships are relatively common, and yet little is known about stepgrandparent-stepgrandchild relationships. The quality of steprelationships is relevant to understanding intergenerational support for older divorced and remarried adults.

Objectives: The purpose of this study is to examine and compare stepgrandchildren's perceptions of two types of intergenerational step-relationships - long-term stepgrandparents who joined the stepfamily before stepgrandchildren were born and later-life stepgrandparents who joined stepfamilies when they were older.

Relationships with former stepgrandparents after remarriage dissolution.

Increases in stepfamily formation and longevity suggest that more children have stepgrandparent relationships than ever before. Because remarriages end in divorce more often than first marriages, many children experience the involuntary dissolution of stepgrandparent ties. Little is known about stepgrandparent relationships in general, and even less is known about how these relationships are affected by remarriage dissolution.

Deconstructing Attitudes About Intimate Partner Violence and Bystander Intervention: The Roles of Perpetrator Gender and Severity of Aggression.

In this mixed methods study, we explored how gender of an aggressor and the levels of aggression (i.e., yelling, throwing a drink, slapping, and punching) influenced attitudes about (a) public displays of intimate partner violence (IPV) and (b) bystander intervention.

A qualitative study describing nursing home nurses sensemaking to detect medication order discrepancies.

Background: Medication reconciliation is a safety practice to identify medication order discrepancies when patients' transitions between settings. In nursing homes, registered nurses (RNs) and licensed practical nurses (LPNs), each group with different education preparation and scope of practice responsibilities, perform medication reconciliation. However, little is known about how they differ in practice when making sense of medication orders to detect discrepancies.

Studying Stepfamilies: Four Eras of Family Scholarship.

Historically, there have always been stepfamilies, but until the early 1970s, they remained largely unnoticed by social scientists. Research interest in stepfamilies followed shortly after divorce became the primary precursor to stepfamily formation. Because stepfamilies are structurally diverse and much more complex than nuclear families, they have created considerable challenges for both researchers and clinicians.

Negotiating a Place in the Family-A Grounded Theory Exploration of Stepgrandmothers' Enactment of Roles.

Purpose: Stepgrandparents are becoming more common, and they can, and often do, provide affective and instrumental support to families. Little is known, however, about how they negotiate and enact their roles within families, especially with stepgrandchildren. Stepgrandmothers warrant special attention because researchers have found that women experience more challenges than men in stepfamilies.

Divorce and Childhood Chronic Illness: A Grounded Theory of Trust, Gender, and Third-Party Care Providers.

Divorced parents face distinct challenges in providing care for chronically ill children. Children's residence in two households necessitates the development of family-specific strategies to ensure coparents' supervision of regimen adherence and the management of children's health care. Utilizing a risk and resilience perspective, a grounded theory study was conducted with 14 divorced parents of children with chronic illnesses.

Divorced mothers' coparental boundary maintenance after parents repartner.

When divorced parents remarry or cohabit with new partners, it is challenging to maintain functional postdivorce coparenting systems. In this grounded theory study of 19 divorced mothers, we examined the processes by which they maintained boundaries around coparental relationships after 1 or both coparents had repartnered. Mothers saw themselves as captains of the coparenting team, making decisions about who should play what roles in parenting their children.

An intervention to help older adults maintain independence safely.

Older adults who live alone are at risk for problems (e.g., falling, sudden illness).

Incidents when older homebound women tried to reach help quickly.

During a longitudinal study of the experience of reaching help quickly, 34 homebound women (ages 85 to 97) who lived alone reported 106 reach-help-quickly incidents (RHQIs). The purpose of this study was to expand knowledge about RHQIs and intentions relative to them and to compare those facets of experience for subscribers to a personal emergency response system (PERS) and non-subscribers. We used a descriptive phenomenological method to analyze interview data, discerning six types of RHQIs, including finding myself down right here, realizing that I might not be alright after falling and getting up on my own, and realizing that something I cannot explain is or could be wrong with me.

Intentions of older homebound women with regard to reaching help quickly.

The purposes of this longitudinal phenomenological study were to describe intentions of older women relative to reaching help quickly (RHQ), to place those intentions in personal-social context, and to compare intentions of subscribers to a personal emergency response system (PERS) and nonsubscribers. The 40 participants were aged 85 or older, resided alone, and needed help to leave home. Two contextual features ("recognizing my risk of being unable to RHQ" and "recognizing my need for a RHQ device to sustain myself") were basic to two phenomena ("negotiating reliance on people to reach quickly if I need help" and "reducing my risk of being unable to RHQ").

Return of the "intimate outsider": current trends and issues in family nursing research revisited.

This article reviews family nursing research published from 1996 to 2011. This is a follow-up to a review published in the Journal of Family Nursing in 1995. Findings from the first review are compared with this one, trends in family nursing scholarship are identified, and predictions and suggestions for future directions are offered.

"Shifting family boundaries" after the diagnosis of childhood cancer in stepfamilies.

The childhood cancer experiences of stepfamilies have not been described despite the fact that nearly one third of U.S. children will live in a stepfamily household.

Moving to place: childhood cancer treatment decision making in single-parent and repartnered family structures.

Few researchers have studied how parents from diverse family structures cope with childhood chronic illness. We designed this study to discern the childhood cancer treatment decision-making (TDM) process in these families. Using grounded theory, we interviewed 15 custodial parents, nonresidential parents, and stepparents who had previously made a major treatment decision for their children with cancer.

Normative beliefs about sharing housing with an older family member.

The aims of this study were: (a) to examine general perceptions of filial obligations toward sharing housing with older parents and stepparents; and (b) to assess the effects of selected contextual factors on those normative beliefs. A national sample of 579 men and 582 women (mean age = 44.6, SD = 17.

Family structure and mothers' caregiving of children with cystic fibrosis.

The purpose of this investigation is to examine differences in the experiences of mothers of children with cystic fibrosis who are in diverse family structures (first-marriage families, stepfamily households, single-parent households). In particular, mothers' perceptions of children's health, adherence to prescribed treatments, and help received from others were compared and predictors of treatment adherence were examined. Children's health and adherence to treatment regimens were not related to family structure.

Obligations to stepparents acquired in later life: relationship quality and acuity of needs.

Objective: . The purpose of this study was to examine beliefs about responsibilities of an adult child to an older stepparent or parent who has remarried later in life. We also investigated the effects of relationship quality and acuity of needs on perceived responsibilities to parents and stepparents.

Older widows' speculations and expectancies concerning professional home-care providers.

Little is known about older persons' expectancies (or anticipations) about the possible actions of home-care professionals, although such data have implications for the ethics of home care and home-care policies. From a longitudinal study of older women's experience of home care, findings are reported concerning their expectancies of professional home-care providers. A descriptive phenomenological method was used to detail the structure of the experience and its context.