3. Study 2
Study 2 aimed at testing, through a 10-week follow-up, whether: (a) family resilience was differently predictive of hedonic and eudaimonic well-being; (b) the predictive role of family resilience on well-being was moderated by gender, employment status, and exposure to other stressors than COVID-19 pandemic; and (c) for subjects having a romantic partner, family resilience and dyadic coping were significantly predictive of well-being one independently of the other.
On one side, family resilience may be expected to be more predictive of eudaimonic well-being because, as previously discussed, conceptualizations of family resilience and eudaimonic well-being suggest they share many common features [
59], which was supported by Study 1 results. On the other side, compared to eudaimonic well-being, hedonic well-being is less stable over time and more strongly affected by emotional experiences which can vary dramatically across time and context [
96,
97], which probably makes it more susceptible to the beneficial effects of protective factors. The same conflicting assumptions can be made when considering the unique predictive effects of resilience and dyadic coping on the well-being of participants having a romantic partner. Finally, relying on previous cross-sectional evidence, we expected that the protective role of family resilience on well-being might be stronger for females, part-time workers, and people who had been exposed to stressors other than the pandemic since its outbreak.
3.1. Methods
3.1.1. Participants and Procedure
One hundred and twelve subjects participated in the follow-up (T2), 80 of whom had a romantic partner. Despite the high attrition rate (48.6% of those who had given their availability to be contacted again), probably due to the concomitant summer holidays after months of lockdowns and restrictive measures, subjects who participated in the follow-up did not significantly differ from those who only participated in the cross-sectional study with respect to any of the characteristics reported in
Table 1. Also, a multivariate analysis of variance revealed that participants who provided data for both waves (T1 and T2) were not overall significantly different from those who dropped out after T1 with respect to the variables investigated (
F12,312 = 1.085,
p = 0.372 for all subjects;
F13,198 = 1.214,
p = 0.271 for subjects having a romantic partner and also reporting on their dyadic coping).
Participants were contacted through the email address they provided at the end of the previous data collection and invited to complete a new anonymized questionnaire, which took approximately 10 min and was implemented online using the Google Forms platform. Again, no compensation was offered for participation. The new data collection took place in July 2020, 10 weeks after the first data collection, when the pandemic situation had significantly improved and many strict restrictive measures, including the lockdown, were (temporarily) removed. During that period, 2823 Italians were diagnosed with COVID-19 and 184 died after being infected.
Similarly to the previous data collection, all respondents were treated according to the ethical guidelines established by the WMA—Declaration of Helsinki [
78] and the Italian Psychological Association [
79].
3.1.2. Measures
COVID-19 perceived psychological impact and psychological well-being were assessed through the same measures used in the previous cross-sectional study. All measures proved to have adequate internal consistency (psychological impact scale of the Coronavirus Impacts Questionnaire: r = 0.75; PGBWI dimensions: 0.72 ≤ rs ≤ 0.88; PWB dimensions: 0.68 ≤ rs ≤ 0.87). Composite scores were computed following the same procedures used in Study 1.
Participants were also asked whether they had experienced stressors other than the pandemic after the first data collection, that is in the last 10 weeks; 52.7% of them reported they did (The stressors not caused by the pandemic more frequently reported were: school problems (22.2%), health problems (21.1%), work problems (15.6%), and conflicts with close others (15.6%)). Relying both on this new information and that collected at T1, we computed a categorical variable for stressors experienced, in which 0 = no other stressors had been experienced since the pandemic outbreak (33%), 1 = other stressors had been experience only before T1 or only between T1 and T2 (34.8%), and 2 = other stressors had been experienced both before T1 and between T1 and T2 (32.1%).
3.1.3. Data Analysis
We performed analyses similar to those carried out in Study 1. Specifically, to test whether the correlations among the variables of interests were significantly different, we followed Steiger’s [
90] procedure.
We estimated multivariate regression analyses to examine whether family resilience predicted well-being changes over time as well as whether family resilience related to temporal changes in well-being indicators independently of dyadic coping. The Wald test and SUEST method were used to compare regression coefficients in the same regression model and across different regression models, respectively [
93,
94,
95].
Finally, we used model 1 and model 2 of the SPSS macro PROCESS [
92] to test our moderation hypotheses, following the same procedure used in Study 1.
3.2. Results
All variables were approximately normally distributed, having skewness and kurtosis lower than |2| and |7|, respectively. Compared to T1, on average subjects reported in T2 significantly lower impact of COVID-19 (
t(111) = 3.815,
p = 0.000) and higher well-being in terms of anxiety (
t(111) = −2.131,
p = 0.035), depression (
t(111) = −3.084,
p = 0.003), positive well-being (
t(111) = −3.115,
p = 0.002), and environmental mastery (
t(111) = −2.042,
p = 0.044) (see
Table 5 for descriptives and correlations of variables at T1 with variables at T2). Stability correlation coefficients for PGWBI dimensions across the two waves (0.17 ≤
rs ≤ 0.26 **) were significantly lower than stability correlations for PWB (0.68 *** ≤
rs ≤ 0.82 ***), when tested through Steiger’s procedure [
90].
Both family resiliency and dyadic coping measured at T1 were significantly associated with all well-being indicators assessed at T2, with the exception of self-growth which was unrelated to family resilience, and anxiety and vitality which were unrelated to dyadic coping in subjects having a partner (−0.34 *** ≤
rs ≤ 0.54 ***). In 16 cases out of 25, PWB dimensions at T1 were significantly more strongly associated with PGWBI dimensions at T2 (−0.02 ≤ βs ≤ 0.59 ***) than PGWBI dimensions at T1 correlated with PWB dimensions at T2 (−0.10 ≤ βs ≤ 0.18). These results mirror those of Joshanloo [
97], which were, however, obtained by investigating hedonic and eudaimonic well-being over much longer periods (i.e., decades).
Multivariate regression analyses indicated that family resilience at T1 (marginally) significantly predicted an increase in all PGWBI dimensions (0.17° ≤ βs ≤ 0.40 ***) and in the PWB positive relations dimension (β = 0.17 **), but not in perceived COVID-19 psychological impact at T2 (β = −0.11), when controlling for their baseline values (see
Table 6). The SUEST method indicated that the predictive relations of family resilience with PGWBI dimensions were stronger than its relations with PWB dimensions, except when the PGWBI anxiety dimension was considered.
PROCESS analyses revealed that the predictive effects of family resilience on PGWBI dimensions, when controlling for their baseline values, were mainly moderated by employment status at T1 (0.52 * ≤ βs ≤ 0.76 ** when comparing part-time workers to other groups) and having experienced other stressors since the pandemic outbreak (0.41 * ≤ βs ≤ 0.74 *** when comparing stressors experienced at T1 or T2 with other conditions) (see
Table 7). Specifically, family resilience was significantly more predictive of anxiety, depression, and self-control in part-time workers (0.52 * ≤ βs ≤ 0.76 **) than in full-time workers or students who did not have a job (−0.15 ≤ βs ≤ 0.36 **). Also, family resilience was a significantly stronger predictor of PGWBI dimensions in people who experienced other stressors or before T1 or between T1 and T2 (0.35 * ≤ βs ≤ 0.74 ***), compared to people who experienced them in both periods or did not experience them at all (−0.12 ≤ βs ≤ 0.41 *). Contrary to prediction, we found that family resilience was significantly more predictive of positive well-being for males (β = 0.81 **) than for females (β = 0.31 **; interaction effect: β = −0.50 *). Given that employment status was significantly associated with gender (
χ2 (2) = 21.81,
p = 0.000) even for subjects participating at the follow-up, we verified whether the moderating effects of gender and employment status changed when estimated simultaneously in the same regression model through PROCESS model 2, as we did in Study 1. We found a significant unique moderating effect of gender and employment status for depressed mood (β = −0.69 ** and 1.06 **, respectively) and positive well-being (β = −0.74 ** and 0.63 *, respectively), with male part-time workers having the strongest associations between family resilience and these PGWBI dimensions (β = 1.34 ** and 1.32 **), even though the conditional effects for female part-time workers were significant as well (β = 0.65 *** and 0.59 ***) (see
Table S2 in Supplementary Materials). The predictive effects of family resilience on PWB dimensions and perceived COVID-19 psychological impact were not moderated by gender, employment status, or having experienced stressors other than the pandemic. As before, having a romantic partner or not was not a significant moderator of the longitudinal links between family resilience and well-being, suggesting that family resilience was predictive of well-being similarly in the overall follow-up sample and its subsample of people having a romantic relationship.
Multivariate regression analyses carried out on subjects having a romantic partner (
N = 80) indicated that, even when controlling for dyadic coping at T1, the family resilience (marginally) significantly predicted an increase in PGWBI positive well-being, self-control, and vitality dimensions (0.23° ≤ βs ≤ 0.26 *), but not in PWB dimensions, nor was family resilience longitudinally related to perceived COVID-19 psychological impact (see
Table 8). The SUEST method showed that predictive relationships of family resilience with PGWBI positive well-being and self-control dimensions (βs = 0.24 * and 0.26 *, respectively) were significantly stronger than its relations with PWB dimensions (βs= 0.11 and −0.08, respectively). When controlling for family resilience, positive dyadic coping had significant relations with all PGWBI dimensions, except for vitality, and with PWB self-growth, positive relations, and self-acceptance dimensions (0.07 ≤ βs ≤ 0.36 **). Wald tests indicated that positive dyadic coping was more strongly uniquely related to anxiety and self-growth (βs = 0.26 * and 0.15, respectively) than family resilience (βs = −0.02 and 0.02, respectively).
In summary, with regard to the variation in the well-being indicators over time, eudaimonic well-being was substantially stable over time, with the exception of environmental mastery which was higher during the follow-up. On the contrary hedonic well-being improved over a 10-week period, especially in terms of increased positive well-being and reduced anxiety, depression, and perceived psychological impact of COVID-19. Also, eudaimonic well-being was more predictive of hedonic well-being than vice versa.
Family resilience was more predictive of hedonic than eudaimonic well-being, even when controlling for positive dyadic coping among participants having a romantic partner. Family resilience was more strongly longitudinally related to hedonic well-being among part-time workers, especially if males, and people who experience other stressors than the pandemic before the first data collection or between the first and the second data collection, that is, during a period of 2.5 months at the most.
Finally, when controlling for family resilience, positive dyadic coping was predictive of greater hedonic and eudaimonic well-being among people having a romantic partner; also, dyadic coping was longitudinally related with some indicators of well-being to a significantly stronger extent than family resilience.
4. Discussion
The results indicate that family resilience was concurrently related to both hedonic and eudaimonic well-being, but more strongly related to the latter than to the former, consistent with the theorization of family resilience and eudaimonia, which are assumed to entail similar features like positive personal transformation and growth, a perception of life as meaningful, and strengthened social relations [
59]. Our results are also in line with existing studies [
48,
49,
50] documenting that family resilience was concurrently associated with hedonic well-being during the COVID-19 pandemic but extend them by showing that family resilience is also associated with eudaimonic well-being.
Despite the strong concurrent correlations, family resilience was less predictive of changes in eudaimonic than hedonic well-being over a relatively brief period (10 weeks). This finding might be attributable to the much lower variability observed in the levels of eudaimonic than hedonic well-being. Consistently, previous studies documented that, being more affected by emotional experiences which can vary radically across time and context, hedonic well-being is more variable over time, compared to eudaimonic well-being [
96,
97]. To the best of our knowledge, this is among the first research which shows the predictive role of family resilience on well-being experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic. The longitudinal research on the topic is not only very limited, but even inconsistent in its findings: one study found that family resilience mitigates the negative impact of the pandemic on adults’ depression and anxiety [
56], whereas another study, examining the same variables in a small sample of adolescents, found no significant relations among them over time [
98]. The present research suggests that family resilience can actually have a protective role in the short term especially on hedonic well-being, thereby extending previous research documenting the cross-sectional association of family resilience with negative affect, depression, anxiety, and stress experienced during pandemic period [
51,
52,
53,
54,
56,
98].
Differently from studies previously conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic, our research also explored whether the links between family resilience and well-being dimensions were moderated by a wide range of socio-demographic and pandemic-related characteristics. The concurrent and longitudinal links between family resilience and hedonic well-being were moderated by three of the many participants’ characteristics considered: gender, employment status, and stressors undergone. Indeed, such links were mostly stronger for women, part-time workers, and persons having faced with other stressful events simultaneously with the pandemic, that is, for categories of people particularly at high risk of low mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic [
99,
100]. Specifically, family resilience was more strongly related to hedonic well-being among women than men concurrently but not longitudinally when we found a stronger predictive role of resilience for men’s positive well-being than women’s. Probably, since women were more negatively affected by the pandemic than men (e.g., [
15,
101]), they immediately benefitted from a more resilient and supportive family climate, whereas men experienced a sort of “delayed effect”. This could be explained by the fact that men, having a more independent self-construal than women [
102], may prefer to first cope with challenging situations by relying on their own resources and turn to family ones only later, in case of failure of individual efforts. Under conditions of workday stress, for example, men in heterosexual couples are more likely than women to withdraw from marital interactions (e.g., [
103]), thereby suggesting that men tend to deal more with their stress arousal by themselves than women. Moreover, family resilience was more strongly (concurrently and longitudinally) related to hedonic well-being among part-time workers than full-time workers or students. Compared to the latter, the former were more exposed to job and income losses and likely to suffer economic distress during and after the first COVID-19 lockdowns (e.g., [
104,
105]); greater job insecurity and financial concerns during the pandemic were related to higher anxiety and depression symptoms [
106,
107,
108]. Therefore, being more vulnerable to the negative consequences of the pandemic, part-time workers, like women, could have benefitted more from the protective role of family resilience. Even people who had faced other stressful events in addition to the pandemic showed stronger relations between family resilience and hedonic well-being. According to the adaptive cost model of stress [
109,
110] people facing multiple stressors are more likely to have poorer mental health due to fatigue and depleted resources resulting from coping efforts (e.g., [
111,
112]). Our results indicated that high levels of family resilience were able to protect from these undesirable mental health outcomes but only in case exposure to multiple stressors during the pandemic occurred in a limited time period, namely in less than three months. If the presence of multiple stressors lasts longer, family resilience was insufficient to mitigate their negative impact on hedonic well-being. Overall, these moderating effects are of primary practical importance, as they allowed identifying those groups of population—namely part-time workers and persons exposed to multiple stressors in a limited time period—for whom family resilience interventions could be more effective in protecting from COVID-19 undesirable mental health outcomes.
Despite the close interconnections between family resilience and dyadic coping [
41,
49,
71,
72,
73], this research is the first to investigate their unique contributions to psychological well-being in people having a partner. Specifically, when considering people involved in a romantic relationship, family resilience was concurrently associated with almost all well-being dimensions and longitudinally related only to a few hedonic well-being dimensions, independently of positive dyadic coping. On the contrary, when controlling for family resilience, positive dyadic coping was concurrently related to a few hedonic and eudaimonic well-being dimensions, but it was predictive of most well-being dimensions over time. Thus, despite family resilience and dyadic coping being supposed to be related and having similar outcomes [
41,
49], their unique contribution to psychological well-being seems to differ. In particular, family resilience was concurrently associated with both hedonic and eudaimonic well-being, but it was not strongly predictive of them in the short period. This suggests that, when people face highly challenging and stressful events, such as a pandemic, the resilience capacities of their family may take a long time to progressively adapt to the disturbances caused by adversities and manifest their positive effects. In line with our results, Conger and Conger [
70] found that resilience skills exhibited during major life stressors promote psychological well-being over decades. Consistently, Walsh’s [
41] developmental perspective of family resilience assumes that it typically requires a long time to emerge and display its effects (see also [
66]). Conversely, our findings suggest that positive dyadic coping may have more immediate effects on psychological well-being, consistent with previous research showing that it can be associated with outcomes even on a daily basis [
67,
68]. It is also possible that, for people having a romantic partner, addressing pandemic challenges with the partner is more relevant to their psychological well-being than being able to do it with the whole family, especially in a Western, individualistic context (e.g., [
76,
77]).
With regards to practical implications, our results suggest that interventions fostering family resilience among people exposed to consistent community and individual distressing situations, like those caused by the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak, may have positive health outcomes in the short term. As suggested by Walsh’s family resilience framework as well as existing evidence on community stressors [
48,
113], intervention programs should be tailored to strengthen positive perceptions, cohesion, adaptability, communication, coping strategies, and adequate financial management within families. Informed by this framework, Ruiz and colleagues have for example quickly developed, in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak, the
Families Tackling Tough Times Together (FT) program, specifically designed to enhance family resilience during the pandemic. The program consists of short videos with self-guided family activities which had been disseminated weekly through a public Facebook group and a website for 9-11 weeks. Unfortunately, the authors have been unable to empirically support the program effectiveness, probably because they tested it through measures of trait-like constructs, which were hard to change in the short period. Our results indicate that hedonic well-being dimensions are likely to be more appropriate variables to be assessed when validating family resilience interventions.
Our findings also suggest that those who may benefit most from such interventions are people most at risk of mental health impairments in community challenging situations, like part-time workers who suffer from greater job and economic insecurity, and persons dealing with multiple stressful events. Consistent with our results, the Employment Precarity Family Stress model claims that family coping and resilience are crucial to adapt to employment precarity and the multiple stressors it implies. However, we must not forget that family coping and resilience are strongly interdependent with the wider socio-economic context in which the family is embedded. Therefore, to promote family resilience in the face of extremely challenging situations, such as the COVID-19 pandemic has been, it is essential not only to strengthen family functioning through clinical work, but also to address the structural problems of the larger community and societal institutions (e.g., employment precarity, inadequate health care, insufficient childcare and disability services) which prevent families from having control over their lives and facing adversities in an adaptive manner [
41].
For people involved in a romantic relationship, it may also be particularly important to enhance dyadic coping skills through interventions such as the
Couples Coping Enhancement Training (CCET; [
114]) and, especially in the case of financial stress, the Together program [
115]. In particular, our findings on the role of dyadic coping for well-being during emergency situations emphasize the need for a dyadic, rather than individual, approach to interventions aimed at sustaining partners’ mental health during stressful circumstances. Stress-reduction programs, when stress is experienced in the context of a couple relationship, should in fact tackle not only the individuals’ stress appraisals and coping skills, but also the couple’s dyadic coping and the interdependence of both partners’ stress levels, distress symptoms, and coping strategies.
More generally, our research indicates that both family resilience and dyadic coping should be evaluated as potential targets of public health policies, because of their ability to counter some negative psychological consequences of the pandemic, especially among the most vulnerable population, like part-time workers and persons dealing with multiple stressful events.
Strengths, Limitations, and Future Directions
The research has a number of strengths. To the best of our knowledge, it is the only research which examined the concurrent and longitudinal associations of family resilience with not only hedonic but also eudaimonic well-being experienced during the pandemic as well as tested whether such associations were moderated by a wide range of socio-demographic and pandemic-related characteristics. Also, our research investigated whether family resilience and dyadic coping—two constructs assumed to be closely interrelated but rarely analyzed simultaneously—were associated with and predictive of psychological well-being, one independently of the other. Finally, the research explores these questions a few weeks after the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak in Europe right at its epicenter, therefore on people strongly affected by it.
As with all studies, however, the present one has some limitations. The sample was one of convenience; participants were selected according to their availability at the moment of data collection and their willingness to take part in the study. This led to a gender-biased sample with a high follow-up attrition, which may have negatively impacted the generalizability and the statistical power of the findings. Indeed, it should be emphasized that our follow-up study involved a very limited number of subjects (having or not a partner), therefore conclusions derived from it must be interpreted with caution. The limited number of participants in the follow-up study also prevented us from testing the longitudinal links between the variables of interest using Structural Equation Modeling (SEM), which has several advantages over regression analyses (e.g., modeling measurement errors and unexplained variances, simultaneous testing of multiple paths) but needs larger samples to have adequate statistical power. Future research should test our results through SEM on a larger and more heterogeneous group of individuals with respect to gender, age, romantic involvement, and marital status, so as to provide a more reliable and comprehensive understanding of the relations of family resilience and dyadic coping with psychological well-being.
Moreover, even though the longitudinal design contributed to clarifying the directionality of the links from family resilience or dyadic coping to well-being, it was not possible to explore the opposite longitudinal links from well-being to family resilience or dyadic coping since these last two variables had been measured in the first wave only. Consequently, further longitudinal studies are needed to fully understand the reciprocal relationships between these constructs over time. Possibly, such studies should be conducted over longer time periods, so as to examine whether the positive effects of family resilience are more pronounced and extend to the eudaimonic dimensions of well-being in the long term, as predicted by family resilience theories [
41,
66].
Finally, studies are needed to test whether the protective role of family resilience and dyadic coping on psychological well-being may differ depending not only on socio-demographic and COVID-19 related characteristics, but also on the family members’ and community’s resources and abilities. According to the ecosystemic view of the family [
116], family resilience is indeed affected by the interplay of many individual, family, community, and larger system variables.