Family Resilience in the Spanish Adaptation of the Strengthening Families Program 12-16

Introduction: Family resilience entails regarding families as systems that deal with risks, protection and family vulnerability with a view to adapting to situations in the short and long term. Resilience is not normally taken as the reference framework for family prevention programs, despite the fact that they deal with some basic elements of resilience, such as family, parental and child skills. The Family Competence Program (FCP) is a Spanish cultural adaptation of the Strengthening Families Program which uses a family strengths and resilience scale taken from the latter.

Methods: Quasi-experimental design, with control group. As for the experimental group, 81 families began the program, taking part in 9 different applications. Of these 81 families, 69 of them (85.19%) completed the 14 sessions. To evaluate resilience, one of the scales of an instrument made up of two different complementary questionnaires was used: one for the teenagers and another for the parents. The included items were taken from the Family Strengths/Resilience Scale Kumpfer & Dunst (1997). In the Spanish validation, the items included were the following (Orte, Ballester & March, 2011): family support/love/affection, positive family communication, effective parenting skills, effective discipline techniques, family organization, family unity, positive mental health, physical health, emotional strength, knowledge and education, and support from other people. To test whether family vulnerability might account for the family resilience levels, a complementary analysis was conducted. A Family Vulnerability Index (FVI) was calculated using three indicators based on information available for all the families: the parents’ labor status, level of education and the structure of the cohabitation unit.

Results: The results of the analysis of family resilience, evaluated using the scale of 11 items, bring to light several relevant details: In the case of the experimental group, there was a noticeable albeit slight improvement in the values of the post-test, when compared with the pre-test (ES= 0.828; p=0.005)

Vulnerability was treated as a three-level ordinal variable, applied to the FVI. This showed that vulnerability-based differences in family resilience are minimal and not statistically significant (p=0.270).

Conclusions: The obtained results show a clearly positive effect in terms of improvements in family resilience through participation in the Family Competence Program. The results show that participation in a program aimed at developing and boosting family competences is an effective approach to take.