In the context of family adaptive capacity, describe family strengths and resilience. What will ...

1) Resilience is the capability of individuals and families to sustain their functioning and to thrive when threatened by risk and adversity. It is the answer to the question Why do some families succeed even when they suffer significant adversity? Although resilience as a concept has been developed and operationalized by developmental psychologists, psychiatrists, and social workers at the individual level (Fraser, 2004), a small number of scholars have extended resilience to the study of families.
The strengths perspective and the concept of resilience are closely related. The strengths perspective is based on the empowering notion that all people can change and grow, and, when applied at the family system level, that all families have available to them strengths that can be enlisted in the service of growth and change. In essence, a strengths assessment highlights what is working in families and balances it with the presenting concern. Assessing and accrediting the strengths inherent in the family system require the deliberate and disciplined effort of all involved.
Research on family resilience has used primarily qualitative methods, resulting in a limited list of so-called resilience factors. These factors provide families with resources for problem solving and patterned ways of approaching challenges that promote growth and successful adaptation. In no way do resilience factors keep problems from happening. However, by including resilience factors in an assessment of family system functioning, social workers and families can have a full appreciation of the myriad ways that families attempt to cope with difficult problems.

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2) A key dimension of family system structure is the depth and nature of its involvement in the social environment. Like all social systems, families require inputs of energy and resources from external environments for their survival; without such transactions with the environment, families suffer from entropy, or the tendency of systems to wither over time. But often, relations of families with their external environments can be a source of stress and strain, threatening family functioning and even survival. Most often, the social environments that families inhabit provide both strain and facilitative support.
The social environment of families can be described as a set of broad social sectors that catalog the various ways that all families engage with the outside world. These include the economic sector and the labor market, educational institutions, public health and mental health systems, public safety and corrections institutions, nongovernmental organizations and religious institutions, familial networks, and informal support networks, among others.

Family mobility and migration illustrate the importance of the social environment in overall family functioning (Sluzki, 2008). Family relocation can threaten family functioning even as it provides a sense of relief at escaping from threatening home country environments or excitement as people are drawn to new opportunities and challenges. It threatens family functioning first through the depletion of social resources immediately available to help families achieve their goals.

Relocation can also strain families through the cultural conflicts that can attend movement across regional and international boundaries. In the face of resource challenges and cultural conflicts, successful families sustain their functioning through active engagement in their new social environment, collecting local social capital to enable them to access local resources and institutions while also sustaining their engagement with social support networks from their original homes (Smokowski & Bacallao, 2011).

How families manage their engagement with the social environment brings the interrelationship of family system structures (e.g., boundaries, rules, roles, power, and decision making) into strong focus. When navigating their external environments, families are managing boundaries, reinforcing rules, and exercising role differentiation, all at the same time.

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3) Family rules, which underlie all aspects of family system structure, prescribe the rights, duties, and range of appropriate behaviors of members within a family. In general, family rules can be explored across two dimensions: explicit or implicit rules and flexible or rigid rules.
Explicit rules are those rules that family members readily recognize and can articulate. These include expectations for behavior that parents impose on children, both prescribed behavior (e.g., complete your chores) and proscribed behavior (e.g., don't hit your brother), as well as negotiated agreements among members of the executive subsystem (e.g., who manages money) and across subsystems (e.g., elders are expected to spoil their grandchildren).

Implicit rules are different. In general, implicit rules are hidden from family members' awareness, similar to the way in which elements of an individual's personality may be hidden in the subconscious. Being hidden, implicit rules can be difficult to detect without careful observation of behavior that tends to reveal their content. But once revealed, implicit rules showcase their importance.

The explicit and implicit rules found in a family system may be either flexible or rigid, depending on context and time. In tense conflicted situations, family members may monitor what they say and how they behave, such as Be careful what you say around Mom. However, at other times, speaking freely is acceptable. Flexible rules enable the family system to respond to family stressors as well as to the developmental needs of individual members. Rules that permit the system to respond flexibly are usually optimal.

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4) Family members convey messages through both verbal and nonverbal channels and qualify those messages through other verbal and nonverbal messages. A task for social workers is to assess the congruency-that is, whether there is correspondence between the various verbal and nonverbal elements-of messages. According to Satir (1967 ) and other communication theorists, messages may be qualified at any one of three communication levels:
Verbal level: When people explain the intent of their messages verbally, they are speaking at a meta-communication level. Meta-communication happens when people discuss the content and topics of communication. Implied messages are also a form of meta-communication. Contradictory communications occur when two or more opposing messages are sent in sequence via the same verbal channel.

Nonverbal level: People reinforce or contradict their verbal messages nonverbally, through gestures, facial expressions, tone of voice, posture, eye contact, and so on.

Contextual level: The situation in which communication occurs can reinforce or disqualify a speaker's verbal and nonverbal communications.

Functional communicators identify discrepancies between levels of communication and seek clarification when a person's words and expressions are incongruent. Vital to assessment, then, is the task of ascertaining the extent to which there is congruence between the verbal, nonverbal, and contextual levels of messages on the part of individuals in the family system.

In addition to considering the congruence of communications, it is important to assess the clarity of messages. The term mystification (Laing, 1965 ) describes how some families befuddle or mask communications and obscure the nature and source of disagreements and conflicts in their relationships.

Mystification of communications can be accomplished by myriad kinds of maneuvers, including disqualifying another person's experience, addressing responses to no one in particular even though the intent of the speaker is to convey a message to a certain person, using evasive responses that effectively obscure knowledge of the speaker, or utilizing sarcastic responses that have multiple meanings. Some couples also use their children or pets to convey messages to each other.

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5) Roles are generally understood patterns of behavior that are accepted by family members as part of their individual identities. Usually, roles can be identified by their labels, which denote both formal roles that are socially sanctioned (e.g., grandparent, mother, father, brother, sister) and idiosyncratic roles that evolve over time within a specific family context (e.g., comedian, scapegoat, caregiver). Role theory, when applied to the family system, suggests that each person in a family fulfills many roles that are integrated into the family's structure and that represent certain expected, permitted, or forbidden behaviors (Biddle, 1986). Family roles are not independent of each other. Rather, role behavior involves two or more persons engaging in reciprocal transactions. Roles within the family system may be assigned on the basis of legal or chronological status or cultural and societal scripts. In many families, role assignments are based on gender. At the same time, as with power and decision making, roles may be flexible and diffused throughout the family system.
In sorting out roles in the family system, individual role behavior may be enacted, prescribed, or perceived (Longres, 1995). In an enacted role, a mother, for example, engages in the actual behavior-such as caretaking- relative to her status or position. A prescribed role is influenced by the expectations that others hold with regard to a social position. For example, despite the changes in families, in a family's interaction with a bank officer, a male is almost always presumed to be the head of a household or the primary decision maker in the family. A perceived role involves the expectations of self relative to one's social position. For example, an employed female may conclude that she can manage multiple responsibilities. The role relationship between a parent and a child is a complementary relationship (or an independent-dependent role relationship) in which the needs of both are satisfied. In contrast, in a symmetrical relationship, both parties function as equals-for example, the division of household or child-rearing responsibilities or decision making are shared instead of based on gender roles.

Life transitions and conflict often demand changes, flexibility, and modifications in role behavior. A family may experience role transition difficulties in making the necessary adjustments when, for example, an older relative comes to live in their home.

Conflict in a family may occur when individuals become dissatisfied with their roles, when there is disagreement about roles, or when individuals holding certain or multiple roles become overburdened. Inter-role conflict can occur when an individual is faced with excessive, competing, and multiple role obligations, especially when two or more roles are incompatible-for example, wife or partner, mother, daughter, employee.

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6) Boundaries, a central concept in family systems theories, can be likened to abstract dividers that function (1 ) between and among other systems or subsystems within the family and (2 ) between the family and the environment. All families develop networks and relationships between coexisting subsystems that can be formed on the basis of gender, interest, generation, or functions that must be performed for the family's survival (Minuchin, 1974). Members of a family may simultaneously belong to numerous subsystems, entering into separate and reciprocal relationships with other members of the nuclear family, depending on the subsystems they share in common (e.g., parents, mother and daughter, brother and sister, father and son), or with the extended family (e.g., grandmother and granddaughter, uncle and nephew, mother and son-in-law). Each subsystem can be thought of as a natural coalition between participating members.
Other subsystems or coalitions, especially partner or spouse, parental, and sibling subsystems, are more enduring in nature. According to Minuchin (1974), the formation of stable, well-defined coalitions between members of these vital subsystems is critical to the well-being and health of the family. Minuchin points out that the clarity of the subsystem boundaries has far more significance in determining family functioning than the composition of the subsystem. The relative integrity of the boundaries of spouse or partner, parental, and sibling subsystems is determined by family rules.

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7) Homeostasis is a systems concept that describes the tendency of a system to maintain or preserve equilibrium or balance. In essence, homeostasis is a conservative property of family systems that strives to maintain the status quo. When faced with a disruption, a system tends to try to regulate and maintain system cohesion. For example, it may try to maintain the status quo in response to family transitions in the life cycle or stressors associated with acculturation or environmental events. As systems, families develop mechanisms that serve to maintain balance in their structure and operations. They may restrict the interactional repertoires of members to a limited range of familiar behaviors and develop mechanisms for restoring equilibrium whenever it is threatened, in much the same way that the thermostat of a heating system governs the temperature of a home.
Homeostasis operates through a pattern of feedback loops to reinforce the status quo and to preserve the family structure. Feedback loops are cycles of interactions, or expected interactions, that are used to exert influence over families and family members. Ordinarily, feedback loops preserve one or more aspects of family system structure, such as family boundaries, roles, rules, and hierarchy.

It should be noted that all family systems are characterized by feedback loops that preserve the status quo. This property of family system structure explains what social workers throughout generations have come to understand: that changes to family system structure are often slow and difficult to achieve. Thus, the force of homeostasis can be a major frustration to social workers and family members who are striving to resolve presenting problems in areas that implicate the family system. Yet it is also important to recognize that homeostasis, and the associated feedback loops that preserve it, is an important source of family strength. It is because of the force of homeostasis that families can provide a stable and predictable environment for development and decision making. It is because of homeostasis that the family is recognized by outsiders as a distinct social system and that it is not easily changed.

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8) Worldview differences between the family and the social worker can become a contest of worldviews, with the social worker representing community values about families that may or may not be shared by the client. Taken to the extreme, worldview differences can lead to oppressive social work practices. Therefore, it is critical that social workers be aware of potential worldview differences and act deliberately to understand them.
To achieve this understanding, social workers need to grapple with their own assumptions about what constitutes a healthy and functional family. In doing so, social workers, through supervision, study, and reflection, need to understand their own worldview beliefs about families, including answers to deeply personal questions such as How should families be organized?, What is the best way for families to raise children?, and What are the proper roles of elders, parents, and children in a family? Furthermore, social workers need to assess client views about families, their perspectives about family structure, and their beliefs about how families work. When social workers encounter clients whose family worldviews differ in meaningful ways from their own, they need to redouble their efforts to understand the strengths of client worldviews and perspectives on family structure and the opportunities those differences provide to promote growth and problem solving.

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9) Families are defined within a sociocultural milieu that prescribes acceptable ways in which family membership is determined, roles are allocated among family members, and the functions and obligations ascribed to families are carried out.
Underlying the definition of family is a shared understanding of two elements of family structure: how family membership is composed, and the various functions that the family serves as an enduring institution in society. Following are some of the varying ways in which family membership is achieved:

Marriage, which may be an arranged marriage
Remarriage, recoupling after a separation, or blended family
Birth, adoption, foster care, or legal custody
Informal relationship, biological and nonbiological kin, friends, social networks within communities and/or cultural groups
Nannies or other surrogates in the family
Variability in families and choices can mean that households consist of single parents or two parents of opposite or same sex, any of which may be multigenerational (Carter & McGoldrick, 2005; Crosson-Tower, 2004; Fredriksen-Goldsen & Scharlach, 2001; Sue, 2006). Multigenerational families can include parents and their children and grandparents or other kin. Also, there are generational families that consist of two generations, specifically grandparents and their grandchildren (Burnette, 1999; Goyer, 2006; Jimenez, 2002). Clearly, family configurations can be as diverse as family membership.

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In the context of family adaptive capacity, describe family strengths and resilience. What will ...

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