Promoting family communication, harmony, happiness and health through a community-based project in Hong Kong: the Happy Family Kitchen Project II

Abstract

A community-based project with a randomized controlled trial design was organized in underprivileged areas in Hong Kong. There were over 40 community partners involved aimed to enhance the residents’ family communication for optimal family health, happiness and harmony. A total of 2,519 individuals from 1,014 families participated in 31 brief intervention programmes designed and organized by 31 service units. Nearly 40% of the participants had a household income lower than HKD 10,000. The participants were randomly allocated into 3 groups (by cluster randomization): core intervention (one session, total two hours) plus booster (one session of one hour) at week 4 post-intervention (A, n=416), core intervention (B, n=408) and control (C, n=432). At 3 months after the intervention, intervention Groups A (1.9; effect size (ES)=0.17, p<0.01, n=416) and B (1.65; ES=0.15, p<0.05, n= 408) had greater increases in perceived family happiness score (score range: 0-100, the higher the better) than control Group C (0.17, n=432). Corresponding increases in perceived family health (0.09; 0.12, 0.01), family harmony (0.53; 0.52, 0.22) and family communication (1.75; 0.08, 0.62) scores were also found among the 3 groups but the differences were not significant. This was one of the first large-scale community based projects in Asia and the findings demonstrated that the simple interventions were feasible and effective in promoting positive family communication and family well-being with small effect size and reflected the success of the strong academic-social service sector partnership.