Obligations to Older Kin after Divorce and Remarriage The rising costs of health care and the efforts of the federal and local governments to cut back on services have increased the importance of understanding normative beliefs about family obligations to dependent older kin. Normative beliefs about what should be done are important to understand because they help individuals define and negotiate their responsibilities, they serve as criteria to measure how well individuals are functioning as family members, and they provide a framework that people use to justify and explain their conduct to others. What people do in relationships is based partly on felt responsibilities and partly on normative expectations about what should be done. The overall purposes of this project are to examine normative and felt obligations to older divorced parents and stepparents and to assess the effects of selected contextual factors on normative and felt obligations. The factors examined are type of relationships (genetic or step), relationship quality, resource availability, acuity of need, prior commitments, prior patterns of exchanges between kin, and sex of both older and younger adults. The project consists of six telephone surveys that will examine both the long-term effects of parental divorce and remarriage and the effects of later-life divorce and remarriage on normative and felt obligations to older parents and stepparents. All studies will use the same design. A national sample of adults will be obtained using random digit dialing. Multiple-segment vignettes will be used to assess normative and felt obligations. Each vignette is divided into 2-5 paragraphs. In each paragraph an older family member needs help (e.g., physical care, financial help). The families experience various transitions as the stories develop. After each paragraph respondents indicate what they think specific characters should do about helping or not helping older family members and they offer the rationale for their beliefs. Respondents will be randomly presented with one of the versions of vignettes in the factorial survey technique, just as in experimental research. Responses regarding what family members should do will be analyzed with multiple regression. Rationale will be content analyzed. The findings of this project will be used to test and refine a model of normative intergenerational obligations and to develop a model of felt obligations after divorce and remarriage.
| Ganong, Lawrence; Coleman, Marilyn (2006) Obligations to stepparents acquired in later life: relationship quality and acuity of needs. J Gerontol B Psychol Sci Soc Sci 61:S80-8 |
