The Family Health Scale: Reliability and Validity of a Short- and Long-Form.

Families strongly influence the health of communities and individuals across the life course, but no validated measure of family health exists. The absence of such a measure has limited the examination of family health trends and the intersection of family health with individual and community health. The purpose of this study was to examine the reliability and validity of the Family Health Scale (FHS), creating a multi-factor long-form and a uniform short-form. The primary sample included 1,050 adults recruited from a national quota sample Qualtrics panel. Mplus version 7 was used to analyze the data using a structural equation modeling framework. Exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) confirmed a 32-item, 4-factor long-form scale. The four factors included (1) family social and emotional health processes; (2) family healthy lifestyle; (3) family health resources; and (4) family external social supports. A 10-item short-form of the FHS was also validated in the initial sample and a second sample of 401 adults. Both the long-form and short-form FHS correlated in the expected direction with validated measures of family functioning and healthy lifestyle. A preliminary assessment of clinical cutoffs in the short-form were correlated with depression risk. The FHS offers the potential to assess family health trends and to develop accessible, de-identified databases on the well-being of families. Important next steps include validating the scale among multiple family members and collecting longitudinal data.

Family-Centered Health Promotion: Perspectives for Engaging Families and Achieving Better Health Outcomes.

Communities and populations are comprised of individuals and families who together affect the health of the community. The family unit is an unparalleled player for maintaining health and preventing disease for public health because members may support and nurture one another through life stages. Preliminary research confirms that family-oriented health promotion and disease prevention are promising strategies because the family unit is both a resource and a priority group needing preventative and curative services across the life course. Although there are growing numbers of successful efforts, family health systems are generally underutilized in health promotion practice. This lack of utilization in policy and practice have hampered the collection of robust evidence for family health. This paper purports that families are important actors in public health. Yet, since no one pattern for healthy families is known, public health practitioners can consider six principle-based approaches to legitimately and respectfully advance the families' innate potential for health promotion and disease prevention. Each perspective aims to foster higher capacity for family health systems to function appropriately in public health practice. Health promotion practitioners and researchers can explore family health perspectives with the potential for systems policy and practice adjustments in public health.