Tsung-Chain Huang
Division of Teacher Education University of Tamkang
Recent studies have called for an increase attention to the family system as a crucial context for understanding the individual development. Although many research scales based on the family system perspective have been developed, considerable empirical difficulties have been identified. In order to clarify such theoretical and methodological issues, this paper first reviews the fundamental definitions of family system theory from a family therapy and family psychology perspective. In addition, five family system scales as well as their relative empirical studies are also discussed. While much work has been undertaken to examine the relationship between family interactions and adolescent problem behaviors, the author argues that vary few of the studies have been addressed to the systemic perspective of wholeness, multi-level, and multi-directional views. Pervious research has been mostly conducted through independent, unintegrated lines of studies. It is not clear how dynamic processes play an important role in the family system. Based upon the research deficiencies stated above, the author further suggests that a more integrated and sophisticated method is needed to synthesize the existing literature into a more processed-oriented model that explains how family members within the family subsystem (e.g., marriage, parent-child, and sibling) interact with each other.
Keywords: family system, family measurement, family function, adolescent , adjustment