Family Resilience and Dyadic Coping during the Outbreak of the COVID-19 Pandemic in Italy: Their Protective Role in Hedonic and Eudaimonic Well-Being

first_pagesettingsOrder Article Reprints Open AccessArticle Family Resilience and Dyadic Coping during the Outbreak of the COVID-19 Pandemic in Italy: Their Protective Role in Hedonic and Eudaimonic Well-Being by Francesca Giorgia Paleari 1,*ORCID,Irem Ertan 1ORCID,Lucrezia Cavagnis 1ORCID andSilvia Donato 2ORCID 1 Department of Human and Social Sciences, University of Bergamo, 24129 Bergamo, Italy 2 Department of Psychology, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, 20123 Milan, Italy * Author to whom correspondence should be addressed. Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2023, 20(18), 6719; https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph20186719 Received: 5 July 2023 / Revised: 14 August 2023 / Accepted: 25 August 2023 / Published: 6 September 2023 (This article belongs to the Special Issue Protecting and Promoting Family Members’ Psychological Health in Challenging Times) Download Review Reports Versions Notes Abstract The COVID-19 pandemic outbreak has dramatically worsened people’s psychological well-being. Our aim was to examine for the first time the concurrent and longitudinal relations of family resilience with hedonic and eudaimonic well-being, and the moderating role of socio-demographics. For people having a romantic partner, we also explored whether family resilience and dyadic coping were uniquely related to well-being. One cross-sectional study (N = 325) and one 10-week follow-up study (N = 112) were carried out during the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic (April–May 2020) in Northern Italy. Adult participants completed an online questionnaire in both studies. Correlation, multivariate regression, and moderation analyses were carried out with IBM SPSS version 28 and its PROCESS macro. Significance of differences in correlation and regression coefficients was tested through Steiger’s procedure, Wald test, and SUEST method. Family resilience was found to relate more strongly to eudaimonic (versus hedonic) well-being concurrently and to hedonic (versus eudaimonic) well-being longitudinally. The concurrent or longitudinal relations with hedonic well-being were generally stronger for females, part-time workers, and people undergoing multiple stressors. For people having a romantic partner, family resilience was concurrently associated with well-being independently of dyadic coping, whereas dyadic coping was longitudinally related to well-being independently of family resilience. Family resilience was found to protect, in the short term, the psychological well-being of people facing the pandemic outbreak. Its protective role mainly concerned hedonic well-being and was more pronounced for more vulnerable people. For persons having a romantic partner, however, dyadic coping seemed to have equal, if not greater, positive short-term effects.