NEWS
UoB Thesis: Women Breadwinners Need Support to Improve their Life Quality
Calling for Including Her Issues in the National Strategy for the Advancement of Women
UoB Thesis: Women Breadwinners Need Support to Improve their Life Quality
A scientific study at the University of Bahrain (UoB) stressed the need for government and private agencies to support projects that contribute to improving the life quality for women breadwinners and their children, noting that women breadwinners suffer from several economic, social, housing, psychological, and family problems.
The student in the master’s program in Family Counseling, Jalila Al-Khabbaz, submitted the study as a requirement for obtaining the master’s degree in family counseling at the College of Arts at the University. Her thesis was titled “The Impact of a Family Counseling Program on Achieving the Quality of Family Life for Women Breadwinners in the Kingdom of Bahrain.”
The thesis aimed to study the effectiveness of family counseling strategies and techniques as one of the main branches of psychological counseling, in achieving the quality of family life for women breadwinners and their children.
As Al-Khabbaz stated that the importance of the study lies in enlightening those in charge of women care and empowerment programs of the importance of the issues of women breadwinners, and to include them within the National Strategy for the Advancement of Bahraini Women.
The researcher applied a program of 10 counseling sessions to a sample of women breadwinners in the Kingdom of Bahrain, and the sessions dealt with the quality of family life for breadwinners: family adjustment, effective communication skills, self-esteem, problem-solving skill, family empowerment, and women’s empowerment.
The researcher defined a woman breadwinner as every woman who permanently undertakes the task of providing for her family members and taking care of them socially and economically. This definition includes the segments of widows, abandoned women, divorced women and those who have never been married but bear the responsibility of caring for their brothers, parents, or the elderly, which includes the sick, the disabled, the unemployed, or those who refuse to support their families.
The researcher warned that the breadwinner faces several problems, the most important of which is the problems of role conflict inside and outside the family, which can affect the quality of her family life.
The study concluded with the effectiveness of the family guidance program in attaining the quality of family life for female breadwinners in the Kingdom of Bahrain, stressing the importance of the government and private agencies’ support for projects that contribute to improving the quality of life for female breadwinners and their children, such as facilitating their entitlement to housing services and supporting higher education for the children of female breadwinners, as well as moving towards economic empowerment of female breadwinners by implementing projects that contribute to increasing their income, either by enrolling them in training and education courses through specialized centers for this, and benefiting from their skills and capabilities, or through institutions that provide loans without interest, to encourage working female breadwinners to work at home, or for those who work primarily inside the home, to preserve her rights as a working woman while fulfilling her family roles.
The examination committee discussed the researcher in her thesis and consisted of: Professor of Psychology in the Department of Psychology at UoB Prof. Dr. Mohammed Miqdad as a supervisor, faculty member in the same department Dr. Mohammed Al-Mutawa as an internal examiner, and professor of Psychology at Prince Nayef Arab University for Security Sciences in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia Prof. Dr. Abdulhafiz Moqadam as an external examiner.
