Introduction
Family problems are a major issue that needs to be addressed and resolved due to the implications it has on the health and wellbeing of individuals. Tensions and conflicts within a family can become major sources of stress. The consequences of chronic stress have been extensively studied, which means that there is a direct relationship between family conflict and the general health of society. considering the prevalence of dysfunctional families across the United States, it can be argued that resolving the problem helps the country achieve better health outcomes. The thesis statement for this research is that a universal counseling program targeting all families facing problems would help the country avoid negative health outcomes across a significant proportion of the country’s population.
Problem Statement
Homes across the world tend to experience misunderstandings occasionally, which often lead to conflicts. When conflicts emerge, there are cases when the parties involved tend to lecture each other or to change others’ perceptions regarding the issues causing the tensions. It is usually a question of taking the blame or who is right or wrong. Such conflicts can become impossible or incredibly difficult to resolve despite the application of conflict resolution strategies. Families comprise children and their parents, and the misunderstandings could either be between the parents themselves or between one or both of the parents and the children. Either way, misunderstandings can break a home that has remained peaceful for decades. According to Shonk (2021), one of the best ways to avoid such occurrences is to avoid escalating tensions and to acknowledge one’s bias towards the issues. However, persisting misunderstanding can escalate automatically despite the efforts of all parties. Therefore, family misunderstandings are a real challenge facing modern homes, and feasible solutions should be developed and implemented to save families.
Family problems often make news headlines across the world, especially where the conflicts evolve and become violent and lead to abuses. There is a consensus that family conflict is normal and that what matters most is how these situations are repaired (Divecha, 2020). Today, the news often focuses on how the COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting isolation causes disconnection and conflicts in family relationships. However, it can be argued that the situation has only been magnified by the pandemic and that its existence did not attract as much attention before as it deserved. Disconnections may be caused by mismatches between partners or parents and their children. For example, fathers that live far away from children, either due to work or broken relationships with a spouse, often lack the proper relationship with their children. In this case, communication breaks down, and attempts for reconciliation may not always work. The main point is that family conflicts are a major problem with serious consequences when not effectively resolved.
Besides family disconnects, other causes of family conflicts have been explored by scholars, which should help paint a vivid picture of the nature of the problem. However, many studies focus on spousal problems emanating from family-to-work conflicts, mostly for working individuals (Fettro & Nomaguchi, 2018). The problems often include poor mental health, behavioral disorders, and poor physical health. In some cases, these issues may require clinical interventions, including addressing issues of stress. In other cases, the problems are smaller, for instance, role overload, relationship strains, or even financial strains. Regardless of the extent of the problem, the fact that it has received scholarly attention means that family problems are matters that should be addressed for the sake of saving families. The main challenge is that problems in one area can proliferate into other areas. Without programs developed for the specific purpose of addressing family conflicts, many families are likely to deteriorate. Fallen families are not the end of the problem since other challenges are likely to emerge.
Significance of the Problem
Misunderstandings within a family have several critical consequences, which tend to affect the wellbeing of individuals and societies. For example, the conflicts can cause childhood traumas, divorce, or even a conflict of generations. In other words, misunderstandings lead to dysfunctional families that affect all members involved. Tensions within a family or other forms of intimate relationships are major sources of stress, which has detrimental effects on health and wellbeing. According to Scott and Snyder (2020), the relationship between conflict and health was studied by researchers at the Portland State University’s Institute on Aging. The findings of this study, which used a sample of over 650 adults in two years, showed a positive correlation to lower self-reported health, more health conditions, and greater functional limitations. In simpler terms, stress caused by conflict tends to lower an individual’s immune system. Cases of chronic stress may include hair loss, heart disease, insomnia, obesity, digestive issues, depression, and burnout. Other conditions include hyperthyroidism, diabetes, and anxiety disorders, all of which could be considered national health problems. Therefore, the significance of this problem can be found in its impacts on public health.
Conceptualizing family conflicts as a public health issue means that a national response is needed. In this case, many of the interventions focus on family counseling and therapy. However, such issues as access to these services are not adequately explored. Therefore, it can be argued that the country needs to develop programs and initiatives that can allow families free access to counseling. Additionally, there may be a need to integrate family therapy into other community health services. With most of these alternatives currently not proving effective, the problem can be expected to persist and families could continue to malfunction. Effective solutions can help boost the health and wellbeing of the general American public.
Population Served
Family conflicts are a problem affecting the general public, which will comprise the population served by the proposed solution. Therefore, all families experiencing misunderstandings are offered the support needed to prevent the tensions from escalating. There are methods of specifying the population, which means that the initial implementation of the proposed solution will handle the self-reported cases. Other sources of information, including news media, social media complaints, and legal documents may be used to identify emerging cases that need to be addressed. For example, filed divorces or cases of spousal abuse can be used as key indicators of dysfunctional families that need help.
Proposed Solution
The proposed solution is the development of a program that targets families in conflicts and offers them counseling and other forms of support needed to facilitate the normal working of the family. The program will have national coverage, which allows free access to all individuals who voluntarily seek the services. The program can be implemented in several forms. First, the priority is given to all self-reported cases, which should be an indicator of dysfunctional families where members are keen to preserve the family and to make the relationships work. As a few and national program, all citizens are expected to have a means of reaching out to the program, especially through telephone, social media, and website. With this contact information, self-reported cases will comprise of one or more family members making contact, specifying the help and support needed, and scheduling appointments as necessary.
Not all families are expected to willingly seek help without some form of encouragement. Therefore, the second form of implementation will be conducting surveys across the country to determine families experiencing problems. The members of the client support will then contact all those families that indicate problems and offer them the counseling and other forms of support needed. Surveys may not be adequate, which means that other mechanisms will be needed to help increase participation. Social media campaigns in the modern world tend to work well due to the wide geographical coverage. With more people increasingly using social media, campaigns conducted across all social networking sites not only markets the program but also encourage families to seek the support offered by the program.
Lastly, the national healthcare agencies and the criminal justice system will be used to reach out to individuals that require counseling services. In this case, the rationale is that family problems could be documented by healthcare institutions and recorded by police and the courts when family conflicts escalate into violence and become police cases. Individuals that find themselves in these situations would be considered critical cases where the first recommendation should be family support. Spousal violence, child abuse or neglect, and even divorce cases mean that the problems have already escalated and the help needed will be in the form of damage limitation. For example, a divorced couple may need to be taught how to jointly raise children without letting their differences affect the wellbeing of the children. Overall, the program is designed for easy and free access to all individuals that need the support. The ultimate objective will be to reduce domestic violence, childhood trauma, and all health problems caused by chronic stress emanating from relationship conflicts.
Research Questions
The focus of this research project will be to explore the feasibility of a national counseling program and the major issues or problems that can be resolved. However, the best approach to validating such a problem would be to express the extent of the problem, the impacts consequences, and the expected outcomes. Therefore, family conflicts are explored and such challenges as dysfunctional families, divorce, and childhood traumas, as well as chronic health outcomes, are outlined. The research questions for this research project are as outlined below:
- What is the prevalence of family conflicts across the United States?
- What are the major consequences of family conflicts as experienced by various stakeholders?
- What is the relationship between family conflicts and the health outcomes of individuals?
- What role do family counseling programs play in eliminating or reducing the effects of family conflict?
- What are the expected outcomes of a well-funded free national program that offers support for troubled families?
- What are the main challenges in implementing such a program in the United States?
Methodology
Conceptual Framework
The research project will be designed to inform the necessity of the proposed program for resolving family issues across the country. Additionally, the proposal is intended to help solicit funding for such a program by the Corporation for National and Community Service. In this conceptual framework, all the variables addressed in the research can be discussed. First, the family conflict will be used to imply all scenarios where families experience misunderstandings between two or more members of a family. These misunderstandings are considered the root cause of all problems associated with dysfunctional families. Therefore, the family conflict will be used as an independent variable affecting other aspects. Second, the consequences of family conflict, including health problems, are the outcomes of the family conflicts and are treated as the dependent variables. Third, the counseling program and all practices associated with it are explored in terms of their relationship with family conflicts. In a separate causal relationship chain, the program is an independent variable and its results, in the form of improved family relations, are considered to be dependent variables.
Method
The mixed-methods approach for this research is considered the most ideal due to the advantages it offered. The argument is that there are multiple aspects of the research problem that need to be explored, each of which may require different analytical tools and methods. Therefore, those elements that need numerical data will be handled using quantitative approaches and the rest can be approached qualitatively.
To justify the nature of the problem, its prevalence can be presented using various statistics from both primary and secondary data. Descriptive statistics, including means, standard deviation, and percentages, will be used to present the extent and nature of the family conflict. The functionality and feasibility of the program will require an investigation of similar programs and expert opinions on the subject. In this case, textual data will require qualitative content analysis where the basic themes and summarized statements are presented. The findings from the mixed methods approach can be presented in a manner that answers all research questions. In this case, the focus will be majorly on the extent of the problem presented using descriptive statistics and the effectiveness of the program articulated through the qualitative data.
Design
The design selected for this research is exploratory due to the nature of the research problem. Exploratory designs are often used in cases where the problem is not well-known or well-studied, which means that the central focus is to gain initial insights. In this case, the universal program for family support, which is free and incorporates counseling, is a novel idea that has not been studied before. Therefore, the basic ideas and conceptualizations of such a phenomenon require the data collected and analyzed to present as many details as possible.
Rationale
The rationale for the methodologies selected for the proposed research is that they offer the possibility of a comprehensive view of the issue and create room for further explorations. These aspects are manifested in the selected approach and design where the emphasis is on gathering as many details as possible to help make informed decisions. The need for the research is rationalized by the observation that implementing major health-related or community service-oriented programs require ideas to be supported by scholarly and scientific evidence. This explains the need to explore the prevalence of the issue and the scientific data showing the relationship between the issue and such aspects as the public health outcomes.
Planning Strategy
The planning strategy for this research focuses on the extraction of comprehensive data from multiple sources designed to address all the research questions. The strategic plan outline the objectives and initiatives, which are developed using any tool the researcher deems fit. In this case, the objectives are developed to mirror the research questions and designed to chronological milestones for the paper. The initiatives will be in the form of data collection and analysis methods and techniques. Both primary and secondary sources are explored, where the primary data comprises surveys while secondary data is extracted from publications and documentation on the research topic.
Ethical Considerations and Concerns
Conducting research that involves dealing with people requires scholars to consider several ethical issues and concerns. First, informed consent is obtained before participants can be involved in the process. Second, the participation is and no respondent is forced or coerced. Third, the researcher avoids causing any harm or distress, either emotionally, psychologically, or physically. Lastly, the most important ethical issues are privacy, confidentiality, and anonymity, which are intended to safeguard the respondents from harmful exposure.
Management plan
Proposed Timeline
Table 1. Proposed timeline for the research
Feasibility
The feasibility of the research project can be justified by the significance of the problem to the stakeholders in human and social services. These organizations have been established to offer support to people facing various challenges. In this case, the family is considered to be the basic social unit comprising members connected by blood or matrimony. The functionality of these social units determines the outlook of the entire society or community. Therefore, the well-being of families can be translated into the well-being of the entire county.
Anticipated Challenges
The researcher expects to face several challenges in the research process. First, not all people are willing to express the problems they face at home, which means that the collection of primary data could be problematic. Additionally, this could cause bias when expressing the prevalence of family conflicts due to fake responses. Second, the extent of the research could prove time-consuming as the research has to collect and analyze both primary and secondary data. Lastly, financing the research could be challenging due to the expenses the scholar expects to incur.
Conclusion
The focus of the proposed research is to explore the feasibility and necessity of implementing universal counseling and support programs freely and easily accessible by families across the country. The program is the proposed research for dysfunctional families caused by misunderstandings among members. Extreme consequences for family conflicts have been highlighted, which have a critical implication on public health. Therefore, the program is considered feasible in terms of the solution it offers and the implications it has on the overall wellbeing and health of the general population.
References
Divecha, D. (2020). Family conflict is normal; it’s the repair that matters. Greater Good. Web.
Fettro, M., & Nomaguchi, K. (2018). Spousal problems and family-to-work conflict among employed US adults. Journal of Family and Economic Issues, 39, 277-296. Web.
Scott, E., & Snyder, C. (2020). Effects of conflict and stress on relationships. Verywellmind. Web.
Shonk, K. (2021). 5 conflict resolution strategies – Use these proven conflict resolution strategies in your conflict management efforts. Program on Negotiation. Web.