Dimensions of Family Functioning in Families With Chronically Ill Children: A Higher Order Factor Analysis of the Family Environment Scale

Carried out a higher order factor analysis of the Family Environment Scale (FES) with a sample of families of chronically ill children. Three factors were found: Supportive, Conflicted, and Controlling. Higher levels of the Supportive factor and lower levels of the Conflicted factor related to behavior problems in chronically ill children, attesting to the utility of these factors in predicting psychosocial outcome. These factors were replicated in similar factor analyses of normative FES data. The study extended previous research, which had neither clarified whether two or three higher order FES factors existed nor determined whether these factors generalized to different types of families.