Human Relationships - Stratton (2003) (Attributional style in families that attended family therapy)

Theory

Heider (1958) Attribution Theory

Attribution Theory

claims that people are "naive psychologists" who try to understand the behavior of others; with this end they assign causes to behaviors they observe. This makes the social world more predictable and easier to navigate.

The causes assigned to the behavior of others may be broadly divided into 2 groups

- dispositional attributions - when we decide that someone's personality is responsible for the behavior.

- situational attributions - when we decide that the behavior was caused by external factors.

Essential Understanding

Distress in family relationships may be associated with negative attributional styles, especially towards the children.

Aim

To observe attributional styles in troubled families that sought therapeutic help.

Design

A qualitative research study - naturalistic non-participant overt unstructured observation/Inductive Content Analysis

Participants

8 families with either step parents or adoptive parents.

Participants (Sampling Method)

Purposive Sample

Materials

- recordings of family therapy sessions

- comprehensive checklist for coding attributional behaviors

Procedure

1) Recorded family therapy sessions that included all of the children in the household and both parents attended the recording sessions.

2) All interactions observed in the recordings were coded using a comprehensive checklist for coding attributional behaviors.

The total number of attributions analyzed was 1,799 with around 4 attributions per minute per family

Results

- Parents often used attributions which implied that their children cause bad outcomes.

- All of the parents in these families made more dispositional attributions for their children then themselves (for example, when children do something wrong it is because they want to, but when parents do something wrong it is because they are forced to by the situation)

- Negative behaviors of children were described as controllable more often than negative behavior of the parents.

Conclusion

Researchers concluded that for these troubled families (we assume they were troubled because they sought therapeutic help) the attributional style was consistent with "blaming the children" describing the children as having negative outcomes and the parents as being affected by these outcomes. This shows how distress in family relationships is associated with negative blaming attributions.