Journal of Family Psychology 

About: Journal of Family Psychology is an academic journal published by American Psychological Association. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Medicine & PsycINFO. It has an ISSN identifier of 0893-3200. Over the lifetime, 2681 publications have been published receiving 153000 citations. The journal is also known as: JFP.

The influence of parent education and family income on child achievement: the indirect role of parental expectations and the home environment.

Abstract: This study examined the process of how socioeconomic status, specifically parents’ education and income, indirectly relates to children’s academic achievement through parents’ beliefs and behaviors. Data from a national, cross-sectional study of children were used for this study. The subjects were 868 8‐12-year-olds, divided approximately equally across gender (436 females, 433 males). This sample was 49% non-Hispanic European American and 47% African American. Using structural equation modeling techniques, the author found that the socioeconomic factors were related indirectly to children’s academic achievement through parents’ beliefs and behaviors but that the process of these relations was different by racial group. Parents’ years of schooling also was found to be an important socioeconomic factor to take into consideration in both policy and research when looking at school-age children.

Testing the ruler with item response theory: increasing precision of measurement for relationship satisfaction with the Couples Satisfaction Index.

Abstract: The present study took a critical look at a central construct in couples research: relationship satisfaction. Eight well-validated self-report measures of relationship satisfaction, including the Marital Adjustment Test (MAT; H. J. Locke & K. M. Wallace, 1959), the Dyadic Adjustment Scale (DAS; G. B. Spanier, 1976), and an additional 75 potential satisfaction items, were given to 5,315 online participants. Using item response theory, the authors demonstrated that the MAT and DAS provided relatively poor levels of precision in assessing satisfaction, particularly given the length of those scales. Principal-components analysis and item response theory applied to the larger item pool were used to develop the Couples Satisfaction Index (CSI) scales. Compared with the MAS and the DAS, the CSI scales were shown to have higher precision of measurement (less noise) and correspondingly greater power for detecting differences in levels of satisfaction. The CSI scales demonstrated strong convergent validity with other measures of satisfaction and excellent construct validity with anchor scales from the nomological net surrounding satisfaction, suggesting that they assess the same theoretical construct as do prior scales. Implications for research are discussed.

Parental meta-emotion philosophy and the emotional life of families: Theoretical models and preliminary data.

Abstract: This article introduces the concepts of parental meta-emotion, which refers to parents' emotions about their own and their children's emotions, and meta-emotion philosophy, which refers to an organized set of thoughts and metaphors, a philosophy, and an approach to one's own emotions and to one's children's emotions. In the context of a longitudinal study beginning when the children were 5 years old and ending when they were 8 years old, a theoretical model and path analytic models are presented that relate parental meta-emotion philosophy to parenting, to child regulatory physiology, to emotion regulation abilities in the child, and to child outcomes in middle childhood. The importance of parenting practices for children's long-term psychological adjustment has been a central tenet in developmental and family psychology. In this article, we introduce a new concept of parenting that we call parental meta-emotion philosophy, which refers to an organized set of feelings and thoughts about one's own emotions and one's children's emotions. We use the term meta-emotion broadly to encompass both feelings and thoughts about emotion, rather than in the more narrow sense of one's feelings about feelings (e.g., feeling guilty about being angry). The notion we have in mind parallels metacognition, which refers to the executive functions of cognition (Allen & Armour, 1993; Bvinelli, 1993; Flavell, 1979; Fodor, 1992; Olson & Astington, 1993). In an analogous manner, meta-emotion philosophy

Children of divorce in the 1990s: An update of the Amato and Keith (1991) meta-analysis.

Abstract: The present study updates the P. R. Amato and B. Keith (1991) meta-analysis of children and divorce with a new analysis of 67 studies published in the 1990s. Compared with children with continuously married parents, children with divorced parents continued to score significantly lower on measures of academic achievement, conduct, psychological adjustment, self-concept, and social relations. After controlling for study characteristics, curvilinear trends with respect to decade of publication were present for academic achievement, psychological well-being, self-concept, and social relations. For these outcomes, the gap between children with divorced and married parents decreased during the 1980s and increased again during the 1990s.

The co-occurrence of spouse and physical child abuse: A review and appraisal

Abstract: For more than 20 years, there have been periodic reports in the research literature about the co-occurrence of spouse abuse and physical child abuse. This review compiles and evaluates those reports. Forty-two studies were found that provided some data concerning co-occurrence; 31 of the studies included sufficient detail to be used in this review. The different types of studies are classified and methodological issues are discussed. The base rate of co-occurrence found in representative community samples was about 6%. In clinical samples of either battered women or physically abused children, the percentage of overlap ranged from 20% to 100%. When a conservative definition of child abuse was used, a median co-occurrence rate of 40% was found. Five models depicting the directionality of abuse in violent families are proposed and discussed in relation to the data and theories of violence. Recommendations for methodological improvements and theory-driven studies are presented. As early as 1975, reports appeared indicating that children whose parents engaged in physical violence were also likely to be victims of physical maltreatment. Moore (1975) was one of the first to sound the alarm. She discovered that 13% of the children from 23 maritally violent families had been physically hurt or were threatened with violence. That same year, Levine (1975) also commented on the problem of co-occurring violence but found only a 2% rate of overlap between marital violence and physical child abuse. Since that time there have been periodic reports of the overlap between marital violence and physical child abuse--with overlap rates that typically are much higher than either of the rates first reported. However, to