Family Triangulation Plays A Role Of Mediator Between Marital Conflict And Junior High School Students' Mental Health

Family triangulation is one of the most important concepts of Bowen's theory. It is used to describe how the children involved in parents'relationship to relax the tension when marital conflict occurred. Though there are plenty of researches on family triangulation abroad, researches on the same topic are rarely in our country.This study revised the Family Triangulation Inventory aims to provide a suitable tool to other researchers. Using the revised Family Triangulation Inventory together with Children's Perception of Interparental Conflict Scale which devised by Grych and revised by Zhaomei, and junior high school student's mental health scale which devised by Wangjisheng in this study. The first research investigates the common characteristics of junior high school students who are more likely to fall into their parents'relationships. The second research explores the effects that family triangulation plays between junior high school students'perception of interparental conflict and their mental health.The main findings of this study are as follows:(1)The revised Family Triangulation Inventory has six dimensions, namely: stable coalition, unstable coercive coalition, instrumental parentification, emotional parentification, detouring-attacking, detouring-supportive, the inventory has good validity and reliability.(2)Some significant differences are found in demographic variables in family triangulation. The scores of boys are quite higher than that of girls in dimensions of stable coalition and detouring-attacking. There are significant differences among three grades of junior high school students in dimensions of unstable coercive coalition and detouring-attacking. Different situations of parents'marital have quite different influence on dimensions of unstable coercive coalition and emotional parentification. Junior high school students with different ranks in family have no significant differences in family triangulation.(3)Junior high school students'perception of interparental conflict can predict their mental health significantly. There are significant correlations between every dimensions of family triangulation and interparental conflict. The dimensions of stable coalition, unstable coercive coalition, detouring-attacking, detouring-supportive predict mental health positively, The dimension of emotional parentification predicts mental health negatively, There is no strong relationship between instrumental parentification and mental health.(4)Dimensions of stable coalition, unstable coercive coalition, emotional parentification,detouring-attacking, detouring-supportive partly mediate the association between junior high school students'perception of interparental conflict and their mental health.