Department of Human Development and Family Studies, The Pennsylvania State University-Scranton.
Department of Individual, Family, and Community Education, Family Studies Program, The University of New Mexico.
J Fam Psychol. 2019 Mar;33(2):143-153. doi: 10.1037/fam0000481. Epub 2018 Nov 29.
Stepfamily relationships remain important over the life course to both children and parents. Unfortunately, limitations in availability of longitudinal data that include useful measures of stepfamily relations remain, thereby scholars must rely mostly on cross-sectional examinations. As a way to more rigorously test some of the mixed cross-sectional findings related to the links among stepcouple stability and parent-adult child relationships (closeness, involvement) for three parent-child subsystems (mother-child, father-child, stepparent-child), we used an alternative modeling strategy to test three plausible models. Multiple group analyses also were used to compare associations for stepmother and stepfather families. Stepfamilies (N = 330) from the National Survey of Families and Households with data from both adult children and primary respondents (resident parent or stepparent) were included. All three models fit the data. The best-fitting model suggests the most probable order of association is that parental involvement is associated with parent-child closeness which, in turn, is associated with stepcouple stability. Results also suggest that multiple parent-child relationships and stepcouple relationship stability are generally positively linked for both stepmother and stepfather households, although some differences emerged. Taken together, findings underscore the influence of cross-household stepfamily relationships even when children are adults. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).
继亲家庭关系在整个生命周期中对儿童和父母都很重要。不幸的是，可用于包括继亲关系有用测量的纵向数据的可用性仍然有限，因此学者们主要依赖横断面研究。为了更严格地检验一些与继偶稳定性和父母与成年子女关系（亲密程度、参与程度）之间的关联的混合横断面研究结果，我们使用了一种替代的建模策略来检验三个合理的模型。还使用了多组分析来比较继父家庭和继母家庭的关联。使用来自全国家庭和住户调查的数据，包括成年子女和主要受访者（居住的父母或继父母）在内的 330 个继亲家庭被纳入研究。所有三种模型都符合数据要求。拟合度最好的模型表明，最有可能的关联顺序是父母的参与度与亲子亲密程度相关，而亲子亲密程度又与继偶稳定性相关。研究结果还表明，对于继父家庭和继母家庭来说，多个亲子关系和继偶关系的稳定性通常是正相关的，尽管存在一些差异。总的来说，这些发现强调了即使孩子已经成年，跨家庭继亲关系的影响。（APA 版权所有 2019）。
