Family Social Capital’s Impact on the Family Stress Model: A cross-sectional Spanish study during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

This article has a dual purpose. First, it corroborates the empirical evidence of the Family Stress Model (FSM) to the Spanish population during the COVID-19 pandemic. Second, this article contributes to extending the FSM by investigating the impact of Family Social Capital (FSC) on the well-established FSM. In other words, it assesses if families with high FSC, when affected by economic hardship and distress, avoid the deterioration of their inner relationships. We conducted empirical analyses through data collected from N = 583 (mean age = 49.5 years) from Spanish families with diverse working situations using the Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) technique to test the theorized model. Our results suggest the validity of the FSM in the context of the economic crisis due to COVID-19 in Spain and then, by complementing the FSM with FSC, demonstrate that FSC can be considered as an accommodating protective factor for sustaining couple and children relationship quality for families facing economic difficulties. Also, in this article, the positive effects of FSC are studied within families in an original way, unlike past studies, which mainly used the FSC to relate civic social capital and showed its beneficial effects in extra-familial areas.