An Empirical Research of ‘Deviant’ Names and Family Violence

─ Focused on ‘Deviant’ Name Functions Which Bind ‘Deviant’ Relationships in a Family ─

Abstract

　　Diverse ways have been conducted to solute family violence. One of the ways is to predict and prevent high-risk families from family violence. In order to predict these families, it is essential to assess poor family relationships. However, there is no appropriate index to assess them.

　　Previous works point out that deviant domestic relationships are one of the main factors to erupt in family violence. It is also confirmed conceptually that deviant relationships in a family are related to deviant names in the same family. Therefore it is assumed that deviant addresses in a family might be a suitable marker to assess family violence.

　　Questionnaire method was conducted in the first study. The results of the study were following:

1. ‘Deviant’ names were positively correlated with family violence. 2. ‘Unbound’ name groups, where a speaker never regulated relationships between him and another person, did severe violence. On the other hand, “inconsistency in a model’ name groups, where a parent’s nick name was different between sons or daughters, did mild violence. ‘Bizarre’ name groups, where a family member was called a bizarre term, did moderate violence. 3. Speakers who called another family member as “Omae” conducted violence to the member.

　　The second research interviewed subjects. Results were summarized as follows: 1.‘Deviant’names possessed higher reliability. 2. These names possessed higher differential validity. Especially, results suggested that ‘unbound’ name groups were related with family violence. On the other hand, they implied “inconsistency in a model’ groups were involved with family problems without violence. Besides they showed that results of ‘bizarre’ name groups combined with both ‘unbound’ group results and “inconsistency in a model’ group results.　3. In the area of criterion-related validity, results were similar to differential validity results. Therefore, ‘unbound’ ones had positive correlation with sour family relationships and the number of family. Meanwhile “inconsistency in a model’ ones had negative correlation with power of parents. The results of ‘bizarre’ ones also combined with both ‘unbound’ group results and “inconsistency in a model’ group results.

　　These researches gave suggestions that “inconsistency in a model’ group was involved with family problems without violence, while ‘unbound’ name group was related with family violence. Further studies should seek improvements on the following; briefly, they are required to prove rates of concordance between siblings or between children and parents, predictable validity of family violence and problems, and criterion-related validity with other assessment tools.