Family resilience cushions psychological impact of COVID-19

Strong family resilience may help lessen the psychological consequences of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), according to a recent Singapore study.

“While there have been calls to address family resilience during the pandemic, there is a lack of empirical study on its benefit. In this dyadic observational study, we sought to investigate the concordance of family members’ psychological responses to COVID-19, whether dyad members’ risk factors mutually affected each other’s psychological responses, and importantly, whether family resilience was a significant factor in these responses,” the researchers said.

Two-hundred dyads, each from the same household, participated in the present analysis and completed the Family Resilience Assessment Scale, along with other questionnaires regarding perceptions, impacts, and exposures to COVID-19.

Correlation analysis revealed that dyads were generally and moderately concordant in their perception of COVID-19’s threats, with responses yielding an intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) of 0.58. Dyads also broadly agreed in terms of how they regarded family resilience (ICC, 0.74). [Front Psychol 2022;doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2022.770927]

In contrast, the researchers found low concordance in the domains of COVID-19’s psychological (ICC, 0.44) and financial (ICC, 0.48) impact, as well as regarding exposure to the virus (ICC, 0.37).

An Action-Partner Interdependence Model (APIM) was then constructed to evaluate dependencies within the dyadic data, as well as to determine whether COVID-19 risk factors (ie, exposure and financial impacts) affected perceptions and psychological responses.

APIM showed that exposure and financial indeed significantly affected COVID-19 threat perception (p<0.001), but only as actors; no partner effects were found for either risk factor. Outcomes being influenced by a person’s own characteristics were defined as actor effects, while influences stemming from characteristics of their dyad partner were called partner effects.

As in the case of threat perception, COVID-19 exposure had a significant actor effect (p<0.001) on psychological impact but negligible partner effect. Of note, financial impact had both a significant actor (p<0.001) and partner (p=0.004) effect on the participants’ psychological response to COVID-19.

“The significant partner effect found that dyad members’ financial difficulties mutually affected their experience of psychological impact,” the researchers said.

Importantly, APIM found that family resilience was a significant and inverse predictor of COVID-19’s psychological impact (β, –0.089; p=0.027). A similar effect was reported for threat perception, though it failed to reach significance (β, –0.097; p=0.057).

“Complementing the mental health studies on individuals during the pandemic, this study provides novel data on family-level psychological responses and the influence of personal risk factors on other family members,” the researchers said.

“Importantly, our data also point to the protective role of family resilience in mitigating the psychological impact of the pandemic, suggesting avenues for future crisis preparation,” they added.