Mother-child boundaries and adolescent psychological adjustment in domestic violence

Domestic violence is a serious problem that negatively affects both the women who are exposed to it and the children who witness it. This study aimed to investigate the effects of domestic violence on mother-child boundaries and the psychological adjustment of adolescents. In line with this purpose, the current study consisted of three parts. In the first part, "Parent-Child Boundaries Scale", an internationally reliable assessment, was adapted to Turkish since there is no Turkish measurement tool assessing parent-child boundary dissolutions. The main analyses of the first study were conducted with data from 298 adolescents aged between 11-17 and their 233 mothers. The findings obtained from confirmatory factor analysis, validity and reliability analyses showed that the scale is a valid and reliable measurement tool that can be used in our culture. In the second part, models examining the mediating role of boundary dissolutions in the relationship between domestic violence and adolescents' internalizing-externalizing problems were tested. Structural equation models were conducted with 208 mother-adolescent pairs. It was shown that boundary dissolutions fully mediated the relationship between adolescents' level of witnessing domestic violence and behavioral problems. The indirect effect of the level of domestic violence reported by the mother on adolescents' behavioral problems was found to be significant through the mother's psychological symptoms and boundary dissolutions. The standardized estimates of boundary dissolutions in the relationship between domestic violence and adolescent problem behaviors were large for psychological control, infantilization, and hostile spousification; moderate for triangulation and parentification; and small for enmeshment and adultification subscales. In the last part of the thesis, a qualitative study was carried out with three adolescents from high domestic violence group, in which semi-structured interviews were conducted to understand their experiences in the context of domestic violence. The interviews were analyzed with the interpretative phenomenological analysis method. The themes were obtained under the categories of "Being a Child in the Middle of Parental Conflict" and "Boundary Dissolutions in Mother-Daughter Relationship in the Context of Conflict". The psychometric properties of the scale, the findings of the structural equation models in the quantitative study and the themes obtained from the qualitative study were discussed in the light of the literature. Keywords Domestic violence, mother-child boundaries, boundary dissolutions, adolescent psychological adjustment, mixed-design