The sense of family belonging in university students from a single parent family compared with those from a two-biologic
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The sense of family belonging in university students from a single parent family compared with those from a two-biological-parent family Hüsnünur Aslantürk 1 & Aliye Mavili 2
# Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Family belonging is considered as an important need that affects the individual emotionally, mentally and socially in all family structures. The aim of this study was to compare the sense of belonging to a family in university students having either single- or two-biological-parent families. Mixed-method research design were used, combining qualitative (26 participants) and quantitative (766 participants) methods. Results showed that “family belonging” of subjects from two-biological-parent families was higher than those from single-parent families. Among the participants having single-parent families a range of factors were significant in affecting the degree of their sense of family belonging. These included: the type of the single-parent family (either mother-headed or father-headed) and the reason leading to being a single-parent family. Qualitative analysis revealed that a significant portion of both participant groups felt part of a nuclear family; felt similarly about the essence, functions and components of family belonging; and reported that their relationship with their parents influenced their sense of family belonging. Both of the participant groups felt the sense of family belonging most and least on “special days” and during “difficult times”, respectively. These findings imply that family structure is critical indicators of family belonging and the relationships with parents related to family belonging. Improving family belonging in single parent families should be taken into consideration in the area of family welfare. Keywords Family belonging . Single parent family . Two-biological-parent family
Introduction Throughout their life, a person can feel a sense of belonging to many different people or things such as family, school, class, hometown, country, local community, profession or place of work. However, among all of these, the family is different because it is the first social institution into which an individual is born and develops interpersonal relationships to a certain age. Additionally, many family-related variables directly or indirectly affect the sense of belonging to family. The family structure is one of these important variables (King et al. 2018). Looking at the change and transformation in the structure of family around * Hüsnünur Aslantürk [email protected] 1
Faculty of Health Sciences, Department of Social Work, Kocaeli University, Kocaeli, Turkey
2
Faculty of Health Sciences, Department of Social Work, Biruni University, Istanbul, Turkey
the world, many different reasons and dynamics, such as the growth in divorce rates, increase in the rate of children born out of wedlock, and legalization of gay marriages in many countries, show us that family has become a very diverse and dynamic structure that cannot be considered as
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