Family Adaptability and Cohesion Evaluation Scale IV in Romania

What is it about?

The subjects without children (married or not) answered the questionnaire considering the family that raised them (family of origin). People with children or who were married or in a consensual union for over one year described their current families (family of procreation). Those who had very young babies answered considering the ways in which they would interact with their young children. The FACES IV package was translated using the Translation Guidelines provided by Life Innovation. LCA, which is most similar to the K-Means approach for cluster analysis and used by Olson, is a method for analyzing the relationships among polytomous manifest data when some variables are unobserved. The unobserved variables are categorical, allowing the original data set to be segmented into a number of latent classes (clusters). Individuals are classified into the class in which they have the highest posterior membership probability of belonging given the set of responses (manifest variables) for that case. Contrary to other clustering methods or factorial analyses that require the observed variables to be continuous, LCA allows for manifest variables that represent nominal, ordinal, continuous and countable data or any combination of these. LCA clustering also provides various diagnostics, such as the Bayesian Information Criterion (BIC) statistic, which can be useful in determining the number of clusters for the best fit model.

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Why is it important?

The internal consistency was excellent in all the studies in which FACES IV validation was applied for the Family Communication and Family Satisfaction Scales. Differences regarding the consistency values were recorded for the other scales. As these results describe young adults from the 1986-1998 generation, the contemporary Romanian family has a good affective and educational potential with only three families belonging to the Unbalanced category.

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