A recent article by health psychology Professor Jan Wallander and his colleague Thomas Jozefiak has been named the Article of the Year in 2016 in Norwegian Psychiatric Clinical Research for Child Psychiatry by the Sommers Foundation, Oslo. The article entitled, "Perceived family functioning, adolescent psychopathology and quality of life in the general population: a six-month follow-up study" appeared in the journal Quality of Life Research in 2016.
The aim of this study was to investigate what role perceived family functioning of adolescent serves in the longitudinal association between adolescent psychopathology with quality of life (QoL) after 6 months. Study participants were 1331, 10- to 16-year-old students in one Norwegian province. Parents completed the Child Behavior Checklist for the assessment of adolescent psychopathology. The students completed the General Functioning Scale of the McMaster Family Assessment Device and the Inventory of Life Quality in Children and Adolescents 6 months later. Psychopathology, family functioning and QoL were treated as latent variables in a structural equation model adjusted for sex, age and parent education. Findings indicated that family functioning significantly mediated the longitudinal association between psychopathology and QoL in adolescents, consistent with the interpretation that as an adolescents experience psychological distress and exhibits behavior problems, his or her family functions less well, which in turn reduces the adolescent’s life satisfaction, potentially affecting a vicious circle. Because the family remains an important social domain for adolescents, even as they realize more independence in this period, it must be an important consideration when attempting to improve the quality of their life experience when adolescents experience distress and problems in youth.
The full article citation is: Jozefiak, T., & Wallander, J.L. (2016). Perceived family functioning, adolescent psychopathology and quality of life in the general population: a six-month follow-up study. Quality of Life Research, 25, 959-967. DOI: 10.1007/s11136-015-1138-9
