Families in trouble / Earl Lomon Koos.

  • Koos, Earl Lomon, 1905-1960.
Date:
1946
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: Families in trouble / Earl Lomon Koos. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    Methodology 11 life. None of these terms can explain why one family is organized or integrated and another is disorganized or unintegrated}^ Despite the difficulty of assigning definite values to families as to their adequacy of organization, it seemed unavoidable that such an assignment be made if the relation of family adequacy to trouble and crisis was to be established. Keeping the difficulty constantly in mind, four criteria were established to gauge the degree of the fam¬ ily's adequacy of organization. These criteria were concerned en¬ tirely with intra-family relationships, which immediately raises the question of the family's function as such in the community. It was thought from the beginning (and confirmed by the early inter¬ views) that if a family had an adequate intra-family organization, its relations with other families would also be adequate. For this reason, no criteria were employed to measure inter-family relationships. The four criteria for obtaining an appraisal of the family's ade¬ quacy of organization were as follows; 1. There must be a consciousness of and acceptance by each member of his roles in the family, and also individual consciousness of and acceptance by each of the complementary roles of the other members of the family. 2. The family members must have a willingness to accept some common definition of the good of the family in preference to the good of the individual members. This willingness, too, must be one based upon mutual acceptance rather than coercion, for the coerced individual, while he may outwardly ascribe to the demands of the family, can hardly be said to be an integrated part of that family. 3. The members must find satisfaction within the family unit. This is not to say that all of the individual's needs must be met within and only within the family; the limitations of urban living for the low-income groups are such as to make this impossible. It is to say, however, that the adequate family must provide the normal satisfactions of family life sufficiently to prevent the individual's being forced to go outside the family to attain them. 4. The family must have a sense of direction and be moving in 13. Cavan and Ranck, op. cit., p. ix.