Research On Family Intergenerational Relations From The Perspective Of Active Aging

Family, as the first and lifelong living environment for everyone, is of great importance to human life. Therefore, "Family" has been an important research field that sociologists and psychologists pay close attention to. Yet as population aging process speeds up, the time that generations spent together becomes longer and longer, which will inevitably bring some problems. As we advocate active aging today, more attention should be paid to family intergenerational relationships and marriage, which are the main sources for the elderly to get a sense of social participation, partnership, accomplishment and happiness. For this reason, this study aimed to design a research tool for elderly parents and their adult children to measure family intergenerational relations status under Chinese cultural background, and on this basis, to launch an investigation into their family intergenerational relationships.This essay consisted of three main parts. The first research adopted a strict and systematic research questionnaire preparation method to develop an family intergenerational relationships questionnaire for the elderly parents and their adult children. The second research used the questionnaire to investigate their family intergenerational relations status qua, and further discussed the differences on demographic variables between elderly parents and their adult children. The third research applied matching questionnaires to explore the relations between elderly parents'filial expectations, adult children's filial attitudes and the family intergenerational relationship.After comparing and synthesizing the results of the three researches, the author drawed the following conclusions:First, through three times'surveys and necessary analysis tests in the research process, the self-developed "family intergenerational relationships questionnaire" (elderly parents version and adult children version) were proved to have good reliability and validity. Meanwhile, the empirical model and the basic theory conception fit well, which indicated that it is an ideal and credible research tool.Second, the overall assessment of intergenerational family relationship between elderly parents and adult children is at a good level. The evaluation of two aspects shows relatively consistent result with no significant differences. The results show that there are different degrees of variation, and some have reached a significant level in the demographic variables, such as gender, age, place of residence, education, monthly income, whether the children live with them or not, children's marital status, whether children become parents or not. Elderly parents have no significant differences among the four parent-child relations(divided by sexual role), while their adult children show significant differences in the cognitive solidarity, emotional conflict, the intergenerational conflict and the intergenerational total score.Third, in this study, elderly parents'filial expectation is at a high level; the overall trend of adult children's filial attitude is at the middle level. The results show that there are different degrees of variation, and some have reached a significant level in the demographic variables, such as gender, age, place of residence, education, monthly income, whether the children live with them or not, children's marital status, whether children became parents or not. The results show that elderly parents'filial expectation has no significant differences among the four parent-child relations(divided by sexual role), however, their adult children of different sexes show significant differences in their filial attitude to parents.Last, the research results of the relations among filial expectations, filial attitude and intergenerational family relationships show that elderly parents'filial expectations have different degrees of negative predictions of both parents' and children's family intergenerational relations'total score and assessment dimensions while the filial attitude of adult children have different degrees of positive predictions. In this study, the Actor-Partner Interdependence Model constructed between parents'filial expectations, children's filial attitude and both elderly parents'and adult children's assessment of family intergenerational relationships shows that both of the subject-effect and object-effects reach a significant level.