Adolescent perception of family dysfunction in Serbia and Montenegro by gender and age

Abstract

In this study, the authors use a specially constructed Family dysfunction Scale to examine the spread and structure of familial disorders on samples of 2803 respondents from Serbia and 1123 from Montenegro. Given that it is about a normal, non-clinical population, more than 4/5 of respondents report good or very good family relationships, while 15% of cases report disturbed family relationships. In order to examine family dysfunctionality, we subjected the 17-item scale with answers in the form of a five-point Likert-type scale, to Varimax factor analysis. The scale, which is being used for the first time, has shown excellent metric properties. Two factors stood out; the first, much stronger, which carries 55.64% of the variance and the second, much weaker, which carries 8.19% of the variance. On the first factor, 8 items were singled out with very high saturations, which provide a picture of cohesive and functional families. On the second factor, also with high saturations, six items describing weakly cohesive, emotionally disturbed and alienated families stood out. Using the T test between the samples of Serbia and Montenegro on the Scale of family dysfunction statistically significant differences were found on 8 of 17 items. In the sample from Montenegro, quarrels, physical conflicts, stressful situations, alienation and lack of understanding between family members are significantly more common. The authors find the reasons in a prolonged chronic socio-economic crisis that led to atypical distributions of family roles and authority, synergistically with some anachronistic collective-psychological patterns in Montenegrin households in the last three decades.