Family adaptation to widowhood
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Abstract
The loss through death of a spouse constitutes a vital event that presents enormous adaptation challenges to the surviving widow/er. Research shows that there are several protective factors that appear to facilitate and associate with resilient levels of adaptation to widowhood. The present study had as its main objective to understand how those protective factors behave in a sample of 150 widows and widowers from the city of Morelia, Michoacán. The participants came from a vast array of socioeconomic levels, with unspecified age and who did not remarried. The researched protective factors were: coping styles and strategies, social networks and family functioning which were evaluated with the following instruments: Multidimentional- Multisituational Coping Scale (Reyes Lagunes y Góngora, 2000), Network Quality Scale (Nava, 2000) and Family Functioning Scale (Mendez, Rivera, Reyes-Lagunes y Diaz-Loving, 2006), plus a series of sociodemographic questions. This research was exploratory, had a mixed methodology and a phenomenological method. The findings show that the participants reported significant use of family and religious social networks, perceive adequate family functioning especially in the areas of cohesion and communication and the use of mainly direct and reconnotative styles of coping. In light of these findings, it could be concluded that the widows and widowers that participated in the study are using protective factors that facilitate resilient adaptation.
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