The Mediating Role of Openness to Life Experiences in the Relationship between Family Cohesion and Psychosocial Functioning among Adolescents: A Gender-Based Analysis

In the present study, the mediating role of OL in the association between family cohesion and psychosocial functioning among school-going adolescents was explored with a focus on gender differences. The population consisted of 50 males and 50 females adolescents having ages of 10-19 from purposive sample of urban, English medium co-educational schools of Jaipur, Rajasthan, India. The family cohesion scale from FACES III (Olson, 1985), the corresponding subscale of the Ego Resiliency Scale–Revised (ERS-R; Alessandri et al., 2012), and the Adolescents’ Psychosocial Functioning Inventory (APFI; Akpa et al., 2015) were used to assess family cohesion, openness to life experiences and psychosocial functioning, respectively. Pearson correlations, independent samples t-tests and Baron and Kenny (1986) mediation steps with the Sobel test were used. The results indicated that there were significant positive correlations between family cohesiveness, openness to life experiences, and psychosocial functioning. Mediation analysis showed that the partial effect of family cohesion on psychosocial functioning was mediated by openness to life experiences (indirect effect = 0.856, Sobel z = 3.78, p < .001) accounting for 43.9% of the total effect. Results of the gender-based analyses indicated that the mediation was significant for males (indirect effect = 0.699; z = 2.43, p = .015) and females (indirect effect = 0.954; z = 2.69, p = .007); however, for the males, the direct effect was marginally different from zero (p = .054), whereas the direct effect was significant for females (p = .014). There was a significantly higher level of optimism and coping strategies in the male adolescent than the female (t = 2.11, p = .037). The findings highlight the significance of family integration in supporting the psychological dispositions of adolescents that promote successful functioning in social and psychological domains, and thus family and school-based interventions targeting these dispositions need to be gender responsive.