RELIGIOUS BELIEF AND FAMILY ROLE PERCEPTION : AN EXPLORATORY STUDY ON CHRISTIANS

Abstract

Family and marital counseling often tread on the issue of family roles. Effective counseling in this area would require an understanding of how these roles are perceived by the clients. Perception of family roles, similar to other types of perceptions, can be derived from a number of sources in a person's cognitive system. The likelihood that religious belief would be a source of perception of family roles for the Christians, among other sources, has been investigated in this study. Semi-structured, face-to-face interviews were carried out with 16 married Christians from 4 different churches. Equal gender distribution was assured. The results showed no significant gender differences in terms of the sources of their family role perception. However, despite being the predominant source of family role perception among the Christians, religious belief was not always the only source. Family background, in particular family role-modeling, was also found to be a prominent source of their family role perception , next to religious belief. These were consistent in all the domains of family roles explored, except for the Therapeutic role, where religious belief was a distinctive source of their perception. Basically, the results has shown that religious belief has a substantive influence on the family role perception of the Christians and that religious belief was perceived to have a major influence in their family life. This has significant implications for social work practice with this group of people, in particular, counseling.