Study On Mental Health Status And Quality Of Life Of Inhabitants In Nuclear Families And Single-parent Families

ObjectiveTo Assesse mental health status, quality of life, and family dynamics of inhabitants in nuclear families and single-parent families, to explore influence factors of mental health status and quality of life, and thus to present suggestions and policies to improve mental health and quality of life.MethodsTaking random sampling and cluster sampling methods, a field survey was carried out for nuclear families and single-parent families from four communities in Kunming. The contents covered general demographic characteristics, comprehensive evaluation of psycholoy, determination of the quality of life and evaluation of family dynamics. The data were doubly entried by Epidata3.1software and statistically analyzed by SPSS20.0software. Chi-square tests were used to analyze general demographic characteristics, chronic diseases prevalence, disability prevalence,etc. t tests were used to compare the difference between psychological scores, quality of life scores, family dynamics scores of two families, and to compare that with the scores of national norm. The correlations between family dynamics scores and psychological scores and quality of life scores were analyzed by methods of simple correlation and Canonical correlation. The influence factors of mental health status and quality of life were analyzed by Multiple Liner Regreession. ResultsThe differences between nuclear families and single-parent families were statistically significant (P<0.05) on gender, occupation, marriage, annual per capita income and the level of annual consumption, chronic diseases,disability and major events. The number of single-mother families (66households,73.33%) was more than that of single-father families (24households,26.67%). The nuclear families have higher per capita income and consumption level, less chronic diseases and major events, less disabled than that of the single-parent families.The difference of the SCL-90total score was statistically significant(P<0.05) between the two types pf families with nuclear families’ being111.89±27.82and single-parent families’ being125.97±37.59. The total score of nuclear families was lower than that of the national norm score129.96±38.76, with the difference being statistically significant (P<0.05). The difference of the average positive items’scores between the nuclear families’(2.23±0.33) and single-parent families’(2.37±0.47) was also statistically significant(P<0.001).The differences between two types families were statistically significant(P<0.001) on the SF-36Physical Component Summary (PCS) and Mental Component Summary (MCS), with the nuclear families’ PCS being81.51±15.58and MCS being82.66±16.40, the single-parent families’ PCS being73.65±21.14and MCS being74.60±19.36. Compared to national norm scores, the scores of PCS and MCS of the nuclear families’ were higher than that of the norms, the scores of PCS of the single-parent families" was lower than that of the norm.The difference of family dynamics total scores between two types families was statistically significant (P=0.026), with the nuclear families’ being71.76±9.39and the single-parent families’ being66.85±11.52.The influence factors of mental health status were occupation, chronic disease, religion, major event and family types. There were negatively correlated between the domains of family dynamics including family atmosphere, personality and SCL-90scale’s scores, for both the nuclear families and the single-parent families.The influence factors of Quality of Life were age, education, occupation, annual consumption level, chronic disease, disability, major event and family types. There was no correlation between disease concept of family dynamics and Quality of Life for the nuclear families, and negative correlations between family atmosphere, personality of family dynamics and quality of life. For the single-parent families’, family atmosphere of dynamics have positive correlation with physical domain of of Quality of Life SF-36, personality of family dynamics have positive correlations with physical, role-physical and role-emotional domain of of Quality of Life SF-36, respecitively.ConclusionThe nuclear families were better than that of the single-parent families on mental health status and Quality of Life. This is due to the different family dynamics, occupation, chronic disease, and education etc.