This PhD thesis titled Networking Correlation Between the Experience of Occupational Stress, Marital Relationship and Child Education discusses the interconnection between four research variables; the experience of workload and the quality of the relationship between the parents on the one hand and emotional and behavioural problems and school results of their children on the other. The theoretical introduction provides an overview of the literature and existing research from this field – first by individual research factors as well as an overview of different links between the variables.
The quantitative analysis was based on a sample of 293 working parents and have at least one child in school, aged between 6 and 18, in order to verify the links between individual variables. Due to difficulties in reaching the desired number of respondents, the data was being collected for three years throughout Slovenia. By means of a statistical analysis we verified the statistically relevant connections between individual variables and discovered that there is a statistically relevant connection between workload and the quality of the parents’ relationship and the emotional and behavioural problems of their children. The only statistically significant difference in terms of school results of the children is in the category »nature of the work« which was verified as part of the workload in the fourth hypothesis. There are no statistically significant differences in terms of the quality of the parents' relationship in connection with the school results of the children. A certain correlation with this variable was identified in the qualitative part of the research, which indicates that further investigation is required. Thus, the answer to the main question of the research on the network correlation between the mentioned variables is in part affirmative as there is a statistically significant correlation between the workload, the quality of the parents' relationship and the emotional and behavioural issues, while the school results are connected in a statistically significant way only with emotional and behavioural issues of the children. We therefore obtained important findings for further practical work with families. This raised the question of a possible shortcoming in the research methodology and in the determination of the school results of the children, which should be taken into account in future research.
The second, qualitative part of the research involved a sample of ten parents with whom we conducted a semi-structured interview. The interviewees described how in their experience the individual research variables are connected and answered three open-ended questions. The results of the qualitative part of the research could be directly compared only with the first hypothesis of the quantitative part which is substantially equivalent to the first question of the qualitative part concerning the statistically relevant connection between the workload and the quality of the relationship between the parents, to which the qualitative research answered as well. The second and third questions of the qualitative part of the research are complementary to the main research question, however, the variables were grouped differently and do not allow for a direct comparison. The interviewed parents believe that the workload is affecting the quality of their relationship, which in turn reflects on their relationship with the children, as the transfer of negative emotions causes noticeable emotional and behavioural issues.
The link between the workload, the couple's relationship and the upbringing of the children is connected with family dynamics. We therefore believe that the results of the research are not valuable only for scientific purposes but are especially important in terms of practical work with families, both for educational and therapeutic purposes.
We find it important to keep these factors in mind when considering family dynamics, as they always occur together and are interdependent. Therefore, there are opportunities for further research in this area.
Taking into account all the methodological shortcomings that emerged during this research (related mainly to the school results variable), the results of both parts of the research are of significant value for further research of the mentioned factors.
We believe that the scientific contribution of the research is mainly in the study of the network connection between factors that significantly co-shape family dynamics, which has not yet been researched in Slovenia at such a scale. Even while examining scientific researches carried out around the world, we have not come across one that would study the network relationship of these four variables.
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