Marleen Derkman

m.derkman@pwo.ru.nl

Title:
Sibling relationships

Abstract:
In adolescents’ daily lives, siblings play an important role. In fact, sibling relationships are often one of individuals’ longest lasting relationships. By being an influential role model, and being a source of help, emotional support, and companionship, siblings might have major and unique effects on each others development. Therefore, it is important to examine sibling relationships and all kinds of aspects that influence these relationships.
In order to do this properly, we first examined the factorial and construct validity of a commonly used instrument to assess different aspects of the sibling relationship (the Sibling Relationship Questionnaire, SRQ). Further, we want to investigate all kinds of influences on sibling relationships. For example, the extent to which siblings are similar to each other might influence the quality of their relationships. Also, from family systems theory we know that other family relationships might influence the quality of sibling relationships, e.g. more conflict between fathers and mothers might be imitated by siblings and therefore might be associated with more conflict in sibling relationships. Or in contrast, siblings might not imitate the marital conflict, but might compensate for this by having a warmer relationship with their sibling. Moreover, the relationship that parents have with one sibling might also affect the other sibling.