Psychological roles of young adults growing up in alcoholic and non-alcoholic families measured by Family Roles Questionnaire

Introduction: This paper presents the process of developing the Family Roles Questionnaire (FRQ) research tool, which measures the psychological roles played by young adults in their families.

Material and methods: Following Wegscheider-Cruse roles/research scales of Hero, Mascot, Lost Child, and Scapegoat were distinguished. The role/scale of Iron Child was added to indicate an individual who doesn’t suffer any obvious mental damage despite growing in dysfunctional environment on the basis of multiple reports from the resilience trend. Psychometric verification has shown high Cronbach’s α reliability index, confirmatory factor analysis has shown sufficient match of tested model with data coming from Polish study sample within the domain of construct validity.

Results: The study was conducted on a general sample of 588 persons from alcoholic and non-alcoholic families between 17 and 35 years of age. Among women and men from alcoholic families virtually every role came out with a high rate, but the highest average result was in the Scapegoat role.

Discussion: Roles of Hero and Mascot in women, and Lost Child in men, usually treated as specific for alcohol families, did not show up relevant. There are no statistically significant differences with respect to fulfilling these roles when comparing the group of young adults from alcoholic and non-alcoholic families classified as “normal”. There are differences between men and women in the scale of Iron Child, which suggests that each gender preferred different adaptive mechanisms.

Conclusions: The Family Roles Questionnaire appears to be a useful tool for individual or group research.