Análisis comparativo de la satisfacción familiar en estructuras nucleares y recompuestas

Abstract

In recent decades new family structures have emerged in the Spanish family picture which is different from the classical and hegemonic nuclear family. The adoption in 1981 of the Divorce Act has led to the appearance of the so-called binuclear or reconstituted families. Family recomposition is an important transition that may involve difficulties related to the deep structural and relational changes. When the transition from the nuclear to the binuclear culture happens it requires multiple adaptations that may be stressful. Despite the abundant literature on the subject, little attention has been paid on the functionality of these complex family systems. This paper compares levels of parental satisfaction in the case of reconstituted and nuclear families. The research follows the open sea approach involving 394 parents with middle and high sociocultural level. The identification of family structures was done using a family structure questionnaire, adapted from the Parent Families Questionnaire (Rodriguez & Luengo, 2000, 2003) and the assessment of family satisfaction was done with the ESFA (Barraca & López-Yarto, 1999; Barraca, López-Yarto & Olea, 2000). The results lead to the conclusion that reconstituted families are less problematic than implied by the Parsonian structural functionalism and key to family satisfaction is not in the sociodemographic variables but in the variables associated with family processes.