Family management is an important concept in caring for chronically ill children. The purpose of this study is to determine the applicability of the Family Management Style Framework for Chinese families with a child who has a chronic condition. The children ranged in age from 6 to 16 years. The structural equation modeling approach was utilized to examine the relationships among the contextual variables, the family management, the child, and the family functioning. A total of 538 caregivers from seven hospitals in China were included in this study. The final model adequately fitted the data. The predictor variables accounted for 23%, 26%, 7.8%, and 12% of the variance in the easy and the challenging parts of family management and the child and family unit, respectively. These findings indicated that the framework is applicable to Chinese families. This result reinforces the importance of interventions designed to enable caregivers to improve family management.
Keywords: child; chronic disease; family functioning; family management; structural equation modeling.