Psychological Features Of Kinship Care Families: Interview Version For Guardians

Abstract

Kinship care is one of the most widespread forms of custody over children separated from their parents. Psychological studies of kinship family relationships and its influence on child wellbeing remain few. One of the possible reasons for that is the lack of tools describing various characteristics specific to this type of family such as performance of kinship families, guardian’s attitudes to education, perception of current life situation, role identity of guardians. This article presents the results of the pilot study of interview intended to reveal features of relationships in kinship care families. Interview is tailored for particularities of typical kinship care guardians: older age as requiring non-standard approach to interview procedure, sensitivity of issues related to difficulties with children as they may impose sanctions from guardianship authorities. Interview includes 72 questions (62 alternative questions and 10 open ended questions) grouped into 8 thematic clusters: socio-demographics of family, psychological features of family performance, current family situation and attitude to it, circumstances of guardianship, content and attitudes to the role of the guardian, relationships with guardianship authorities, attitudes to education and assessment of family perspective. Pilot study was carried out on 29 kinship care families and 42 nuclear and extended regular families. The results showed that the developed interview can be used as a tool to study psychological characteristics of kinship care families in relation to of psychological specifics of guardians in such families.