From Family Crisis to State Crisis

Former Yan (285/337–370) was a state in Northeast China established by the Murong branch of the Xianbei, a partly nomadic people who had settled on the Chinese frontier in the 220s. The Murong gradually accommodated themselves to Chinese ways and, having defeated their rivals along the frontier by the 340s, became a major power in North China. A decade later they destroyed the states which had been strongest north of the Yellow River (Later Zhao 319–351) and their ruler assumed imperial dignity. By this time they were close to becoming the masters of North China. Schreiber explains one of the secrets of their success by arguing that the creation and the conduct of the Yan government was “a family affair”. He claimed that the Yan was a stable state, relatively free of internal turmoil and civil war. However, deteriorating family relations within the ruling elite, which did not lead to serious armed conflict but dragged on for about two decades, played a major role in the demise of their state. In the present paper I examine the causes of this deterioration and attempt to shed light on the connections between the crisis it caused and earlier attempts to forestall such a crisis.

Psychometric Testing of The Chinese Version of The Family Crisis Oriented Personal Evaluation Scales In Families of Patients With Dementia

Background: The Family Crisis Oriented Personal Evaluation Scales (F-COPES) is a widely used instrument to evaluate family coping behaviours. However, no Chinese version of this scale have been developed and validated in China. This study aimed to develop a Chinese version of the F-COPES and evaluate its psychometric properties in the families of patients with dementia who have heavy stress and care burdens.Methods: A cross-sectional study in the specialist memory and geriatric psychiatric clinics of four hospitals in Beijing, China. The English version of the F-COPES was translated into Chinese according to the standard translation guideline. An expert panel was invited to evaluate the content validity index of the Chinese version of this scale. This study included 215 families of patients with dementia. The item homogeneity analysis was conducted by using corrected item-total correlation, corrected item-subscale correlation, and changes of Cronbach’s alpha coefficient of subscales after deleting each item. The factor structure was analysed by using a confirmatory factor analysis. The convergent validity was tested by correlating the F-COPES to the Multidimensional Scale of Perceived Social Support (MSPSS). The internal consistency was assessed by using Cronbach's alpha coefficients of the whole scale and subscales.Results: The content validity index of the Chinese version of the F-COPES was 0.98, with that of each item ranging from 0.83 to 1.00. The result of item homogeneity analysis was satisfactory except for the items in the subscale of passive appraisal. The confirmatory factor analysis identified six subscales; namely, acquiring relatives’ support, acquiring friends’ support, acquiring neighbours’ or others’ support, reframing, seeking spiritual support, and passive appraisal, with acceptable model fit indices (χ2/df = 1.65, CFI = 0.91, GFI = 0.85, TLI = 0.90, PGFI = 0.69, RMSEA = 0.06). The convergent correlation between the F-COPES and the MSPSS was strong (r = 0.50, P < 0.01). The Cronbach's alpha coefficients of the whole scale was 0.86.Conclusion: The Chinese version of the F-COPES showed satisfactory psychometric properties. It may serve as a useful scale for assessing the coping behaviours in families of patients with dementia in China.

Imposed Belonging

The concept and realization of family and gender issues in socialist Poland was generally a contested topic. The family had remained a core institution of society—and yet, it underwent a significant transformation due to changing life-style models and social expectations. In the late 1960s, a crisis of the family was officially acknowledged, as the new models and expectations increasingly conflicted with the shortage of economic and social resources, and systemic limitations. Diverging ideas about gender roles and stereotypes intensified the tensions in the family and private sphere. This article discusses manifestations of the family crisis in literature and film of the time, tracing the issues debated in society and uncovering dominant narratives. Social problems like alcoholism or domestic violence found their way into official statistics as well as into literary or cinematographic productions, the arts presenting a qualitative seismology of the family in crisis. In staging issues like partnership pragmatism or a “monetarization” of gender relations, literature and film functioned as an introspective tool for social and cultural discourses. This cultural debate on the family crisis will be cross-read with the March 1968 crisis in Poland. The student revolts, their repression and an anti-Semitic campaign, events known as “March ’68”, brought about an ethno-nationalist paradigm in politics and society that silently reframed family lineage as a socially and politically relevant dimension. Yet the narrative of class and ethnic family liability suggested by the mass media went mostly unregistered in the arts, emerging only on the margins of cultural production.

Anticipating Permanent Persuader in Vivek Shanbhag’s Ghachar Ghochar

Role of intellectual is often a crucial as well as controversial issue in academics and activism when an intellectual as a permanent persuader is getting more meager amidst the dominance of consumerist culture and collective crisis of the subaltern. While reading Vivek Shanbhag’s novella Ghachar Ghochar, translated from the Kannada into English by Srinath Perur, an affirmation of intellectual’s role as a permanent persuader echoes time and again. The protagonist (unnamed narrator) is helpless, who neither could escape from collective crisis of his family nor play any role against the mounting antagonistic condition. He keeps on watching his family crisis with the thought ‘it’s not we who controls money, it’s the money that controls us. ’In the era of proliferation of the hegemony of consumerist culture, as the novella depicts, both the oppressors and oppressed are lingering in limbo beyond the rescue zone anticipating permanent persuader.

STUDY OF STRATEGIES OF BEHAVIOR OF SPOUSES IN FAMILY CONFLICTS

The article examines and analyzes the strategies of spouses' behavior in family conflicts. The article describes the results of the study of life in the conditions of a normative family crisis associated with the birth of the first child. The results of the study allow us to analyze the level of conflict resistance of spouses, their communicative tolerance, the peculiarities of the spouses' acceptance of each other, their desire to adapt to new family situations.