Debate and Argument: The Family Systems Test: A Comment on Gehring and Marti (1993)

Abstract

The last few decades have witnessed a burst of activity aimed at relating the development of psychopathology to various aspects of family process and structure. In particular, a number of schools of thought (e.g. systemic, structural, strategic) have become very well known and influential, loosely connected by their operating assumption that a child's disturbance is a part of family style. The enthusiasm with which these models have been adopted, however, has not been matched by empirical examination of their working hypothesis. This dearth of empirical support has persisted despite repeated calls for quality research in this area (e,g. Bcdnar, Burlinghame & Masters, 1988). Thus, in this context, it is pleasing to see studies such as the recent one by Gehring and Marti (1993) that attempt to examine specific hypotheses about the relationship between family characteristics and child psychopathology.However, closer inspection of their paper reveals little correspondence between the conclusions they present in the discussion section, and the conclusions that are allowable in terms of the methodology used. They conclude "The data of this study support chnical hypotheses of structural family theory" (p. 373). This conclusion cannot be made from their data for the following reasons:First, no data are presented on the equivalence of the clinic and non-clinic groups on sociodemographic variables. Socioeconomic status, education level, frequencies of single parent and step families, age and sex of the child, are examples of important variables they are predictive of family relations, but are not considered in this paper. Thus, it is impossible to discern if the results are due to other factors that differentiate the groups.Second, there appears to be a fatal flaw in the assignment of children to clinic vs non-clinic groups. From the description of procedure (p. 366), it appears that "children with family members who showed chronic medical problems, mental disorders, deviance or disability (8%) were excluded from the study". It appears that this exclusion criterion was applied to the non-clinic group only and thus any conclusions