Emotional relationship quality of adult children with ageing parents: on solidarity, conflict and ambivalence

Abstract

Emotions towards a relationship partner provide relevant and specific information about relationship quality. Based on this assumption the present study was performed to identify different types of emotional relationship quality of middle-aged adult children with their ageing parents. This was done by cluster analytic procedures in a sample of 1,208 middle-aged adult children (482 men, 726 women). Using ratings of positive and negative emotions towards their mother and father as grouping variables, the same four-cluster solution emerged for both the child-mother relationship and the child-father relationship. Clusters were labelled as amicable, disharmonious, detached and ambivalent relationships. Results showed that especially amicable relationships clearly prevailed followed by ambivalent, detached and disharmonious relationships. Clusters differed significantly with respect to gender of adult child, willingness to support, expected parental support and overt conflicts. In a cross-classification of cluster membership regarding the child-mother relationship (four clusters) and the child-father relationship (four clusters), all possible 16 combinations were observed, with a considerable degree of divergence regarding the type of relationship quality within the same family. Results are discussed with respect to types of emotional relationship quality, within family differences and the intrafamilial regulation of relationship quality.

Humor Types Show Different Patterns of Self-Regulation, Self-Esteem, and Well-Being

“…Also, selfdefeating humor was not related with flexible goal adjustment and life satisfaction. Finally, to examine associations of humor clusters, the so called humor types, with the well-being variables, self-esteem, tenacious goal pursuit, flexible goal adjustment, and life satisfaction were tested for mean differences between the three clusters (see Ferring et al 2009, for an example using a comparable methodological approach). We performed univariate analyses of variance (ANOVAs) for each dependent variable (DV), with apportionment of a = .01.…”

Tourists’ Destination Loyalty through Emotional Solidarity with Residents: An Integrative Moderated Mediation Model

“…This relationship translated through an emotional feeling can be analyzed through the construct of emotional solidarity (Woosnam, Norman, and Ying 2009). Research within disciplines such as anthropology, sociology, and social psychology (Bahr, Mitchell, Li, Walker, and Sucher 2004;Clements 2013;Ferring, Michels, Boll, and Filipp 2009;Merz, Schuengel, and Schulze 2007) has acknowledged the importance of the concept of emotional solidarity in explaining other constructs. Notwithstanding the plethora of work examining antecedents of tourist satisfaction and loyalty, an integrative model that combines tourists' emotional solidarity with residents, tourist satisfaction, and destination loyalty remains absent from the tourism literature.…”

Emotional Relations With Grandparents and Received Support: The Adolescent View

“…(b) The cross-sectional nature of the data might conceal dynamics of relationship regulation. In fact, the observed relational states might not be the endpoint of relationship regulation, but relationships are subjected to changes (see Ferring et al, 2009); for example, an "amicable" relationship might become "ambivalent" depending on the situational context, life course events, and the way individuals deal with the latter.…”

“…Ferring et al, 2009). With regard to adult children and their parents, similar attempts to describe patterns of relations have been carried out, for instance, by Silverstein, Bengtson and Lawton (1997), Bengtson and colleagues (2000), and Ferring et al (2009).…”

“…As Dolbin-MacNab, Rodgers, and Traylor (2009) put it in their retrospective, qualitative study on relations between grandchildren and their grandparents who raised them, coping with intergenerational ambivalence might be a central task in grandchild-grandparent relations. Though, while ambivalence in adult child-parent relations has been studied empirically in more detail (e.g., Ferring, Michels, Boll, & Filipp, 2009;Lüscher & Lettke, 2004), it has only recently been addressed with respect to grandchild-grandparent relations (Dolbin-MacNab et al, 2009). …”