Preliminary communication
The Quality of Family Relations In Rural and Urban Families
Slavica Blažeka
; Department of Social Work, Faculty of Law, University of Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia
Josip Janković
; Department of Social Work, Faculty of Law, University of Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia
Damir Ljubotina
; Department of Psychology, Faculty of Philosophy, University of Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia
Abstract
This article analyses the quality of family relations in modern families
in post-war period in Croatia. The filed work carried out on the sample
of 777 families with primary-school children - 212 families living in
villages (27.3%), 292 families living in towns (37.6%) and 273 (35.1%) city families. Spouses from the subject families were separately interviewed and asked to evaluate the quality of family
relationships - between parents and children, husbands and wives,
grandchildren and grandparents. It examined the differences in evaluation of the quality of family relations based on the size of the
settlement they live in (village, town, city) and the gender of the subjects (fathers and mothers). The following dimensions of the quality of family relations were measured: satisfaction with the frequency of conversation, satisfaction with the openness of conversation, assessment of mutual love and assessment of the general quality of family relations. The data was analysed both by
descriptive statistics, using chi-square to check whether the found
differences were significant, and with simple and complex variance.
The results showed that women, regardless of the size of the of the
settlement they live in, expressed statistically significant higher levels
of satisfaction with the frequency of conversations with children,
than their husbands. Estimation of the quality of partner's relations
showed that husbands in towns were significantly more satisfied with
the frequency of conversation between spouses, than husbands in
cities. On the other hand, mothers in cities were significantly less satisfied with the frequency of conversation between grandparents
and grandchildren, than fathers. Furthermore, it was found that mothers from cities saw the quality of family relations significantly
better than mothers from villages. The mean values on the evaluation
scale of the quality of general family relations showed a predominantly high satisfaction with the quality of relations in general,
regardless of the gender and the size of the settlement in which the
subjects live.
Keywords
rural and urban family; quality of family relations; openness and frequency of conversation; mutual love between parents and children; spouses; grandparents and grandchildren
Hrčak ID:
33967
URI
Publication date:
12.3.2009.
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