La adolescencia en contextos familiares en situación de riesgo psicosocial

Abstract

The main objective of this Thesis is to analyze the psychosocial and family characteristics of adolescents who grow up in families in situation of psychosocial risk. With the help of semi-structured interviews, questionnaires and the Delphi method, information was obtained from 449 boys and girls aged between 11 and 17 years of age. Two differentiated groups were used: one group of adolescents from families that used Family Social Services (FSS), which included 223 children (at-risk sample) and another group from families that did not use social protection services, made up of 226 children (comparison sample). The analytical levels and dimensions evaluated were: individual (socio-demographic profile, emotional self-esteem, parental control perceived, adjustment problems, stressful life events and trajectory of individual risk), interpersonal (parental socialization) and family (sociodemographic profile, family cohesion and trajectory of family risk). The research design was non-experimental, based preferably on a quantitative cross sectional and descriptive methodology. The data collected in this Thesis was analyzed using exploratory and confirmatory analysis techniques, both univariant and multi¬variant, with the help of SPSS (version 15.1) and EQS (version 6.1) statistical packages. In general, the results of this study provide empirical evidence of a variety of psychosocial profiles for the adolescents from families using FSS and those children in the comparison group. Without overlooking the heterogeneity found in the sample of at-risk adolescents, it was proven that children who grew up in these homes, as a group, presented greater personal and family adaptation problems than those from the comparison group. The differences between the two groups were more evident for the accumulation of stressful life events and adjustment problems than for parental socialization. With respect to this last dimension, the three analytical perspectives (dimensional, typological and situational) used showed that the responsible women in the at-risk family contexts generally differed from the comparison group in two aspects: (1) parental acceptance and implication was lower when the young person reached the age of 16 and 17 years; (2) they did not react in the same way when faced with educational situations that required a high and medium level of parental response. This Thesis ends by proposing a theoretical model, developed from the empirical evidence available in this work, which explains the relationship between the various analytical indicator levels during adolescence in the adverse contexts. In this regard, parental socialization in these environments was explained by the incidence of personal factors of the mothers (risk trajectory, self-esteem and parental control perceived) as well as by the actual age of the boys and girls. On the other hand, adolescent behavioral problems were explained by parental socialization (preferably by the parental acceptance/implication dimension), family cohesion, the concentration of stressful life events and the age of the children. It must be highlighted that the indicators included in the model allowed the extemalization of problems of adolescents to be explained to a greater extent than internalizing problems. Finally, this work presents a summary of the needs and strengths found in the lives of the adolescents who grow up in situations of adversity and a series of practical recommendations are suggested. The hope is that these recommendations will significantly contribute to the improvement of family preservation policies.