engleski

Qualities of sibling relationships from adolescence to late adulthood

The sibling relationship is typically the longest-lasting one in a person's life. Although it is generally acknowledged that this relationship is important over the course of the life-span, most of the research over past few decades has focused either on very early sibling relationships (i.e. during the childhood) or on these relationships in the old age. The studies that will be presented in this paper were aimed to examine the qualities of sibling relationship in adolescents and in a more heterogeneous sample of adults, as well as their associations with the gender and age structure of the sibling dyad, contact between the siblings, and siblings subjective well-being and self-esteem. In the sample of adults the participants (N=229) ranging in age from 35 to 72 years completed Croatian version of the Adult Sibling Relationship Questionnaire (Stocker, Lanthier and Furman, 1995) and a series of instruments aimed to assess various aspects of their personal and interpersonal functioning, including depression, self-esteem, loneliness and life satisfaction. In the sample of adolescents 147 students at the University of Zadar completed the ASRQ and a demographic questionnaire. The results of these studies provided support for the previous research findings that three dimensions – warmth, conflict, and rivalry – are important for the understanding of the siblings’ relationship in adolescence and adulthood. The findings also support the notion that various qualities of the sibling relationship are important to one's self-esteem and well-being during adulthood. The pattern of the results concerning the impact of the dyad gender and age composition on the quality of sibling relationship is not completely in line with previous theorising, which is based primarily on the results from the research with a more age narrowed samples of people from other cultures.

sibling relationships; adolescence; late adulthood

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