An investigation on need affiliation and its relation to family cohesion in Turkish adolescents

Abstract

The present study is an investigation on the need for affiliation and its relation to the level of cohesiveness in the family. By administering Faces II Scale of Family Cohesion and Adaptability, the families of the subjects were divided into four groups of different cohesion levels ranging from the lowest cohesion (ie. "disengaged") to the highest (ie. "enmeshed"). The need for affiliation was defined as establishing, maintaining or restoring a positive affective relationship with another person. Four T.A.T. cards were used for measuring the degree of afffiliation and the need for affiliation was predicted to increase as the cohesion level in the family increased. It was also predicted that as the Size of the family (ie. number of children) increased, there will be a decrease in the need affiliation scores of the subjects. Besides the stated relations, certain characteristics of the subjects like death, divorce, or remarriage in the family, the presence of grandparents in the family atmosphere the age of the parents, and whether the mother worked or not were also examined in relation to the need for affiliation and the level of cohesion. 70 subjects of the study were all females coming from lower middle socio-economic status families, ages between 15- 17. The results have shown that the predicted relation exists between the need for affiliation and level of cohesion in the family. That is, as cohesiveness, in the family increases, so does the need for affiliation. wtth regard to the second hypothesis, the results yielded a nonsignificant relation between the two variables; in other words, no significant increase was observed in the need for affiliation as the size of the nuclear family increased. Families with "working mothers" seemed to be more cohesive and the members of such families received higher scores on need for affiliation. Other factors such as death, divorce, remarriage, etc. did not have any significant relation with need for affiliation and family cohesion level.Certain suggestions were made on the basis of the results obtained from this investigation.