Stigma, the Quality of Family Members' Relationships and Mental Health of Prisoners' Families

Regarding the importance of maintaining and enhancing family members relationships during the period of imprisonment, the present paper uses a survey method to examine the relationships between stigma (independent variable), the quality of family members relationships (mediating variable), and lack of mental health of family members (outcome variable). The variables became operational as follow: The stigma in two dimensions of interaction and gender; the quality of family members' relationships in three dimensions of wife-husband relationships, mother-child relationships, and father-child relationships; and mental health in three dimensions of depression, anxiety of female head of household, and children conduct disorder. The systematic sampling was used and included 222 women head of households supported by the Center for the Protection of Prisoners in Tehran. Based on findings in the range of 1 to 6, the average quality of family members' relationships was 3.6 and it was moderate. The increase in the stigma was accompanied by a reduction in the quality of family members' relationships. Also, the increase in the stigma led to an increase in the level of lack of mental health in the families. Decreasing the quality of family members' relationships was also associated with an increase in lack of mental health status. According to the results of multivariate analysis, 15% of changes in the variance of women's depression were explained with the entry of the quality of wife-husband relationships, and the quality of mother-child relationships, 14% of variations in women's anxiety variable were explained with the entry of quality of mother- child relationships, and the number of people who are supported by the mother, and 23.4% of the variance of children's conduct disorder was explained with entering the quality variables of the father-child relationship, the quality of mother-child relationship and household income per capita.