Man, Woman, and Marriage by Alan L. Grey

Author:Alan L. Grey [Grey, Alan L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Sociology, General, Marriage & Family
ISBN: 9781351507424
Google: uR0uDwAAQBAJ
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 6386631
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2008-07-01T00:00:00+00:00

6 Psychological Study of Whole Families

Gerald Handel

In his article “Abnormalities of Behavior,” White (1959) introduces a group of references oh schizophrenia with this comment: “It is reassuring to find that several workers are using the concept of interaction patterns in families rather than the questionable cause-effect model of parent influencing child [p. 279].” The implied rarity of this concept in the psychological literature is indicated by the fact that four of the five publications White mentions are of psychiatric origin, while only one is psychological; the rarity is underscored by the fact that Hoffman and Lippitt’s ( 1960) entire presentation of family research methods in child psychology is cast explicitly within the cause-effect framework of. parent influencing child.

There is an ambiguity in White’s term “interaction patterns in families.” On the one hand, it may be taken to mean interaction between some but not all members of a family, such as interaction between husband and wife (Tharp, 1963), mother and child, father and child, or child and child. Hoffman and Lippitt report that studies of parent-child interaction are increasing and they suggest that this is partly because of the failure of the simple parent-child cause-effect model.

White’s term may, on the other hand, be taken to refer to interaction of all the family members, whether the whole family be defined as the nuclear or conjugal family whose members share a common household or the extended family residing in one or more households. The concept of family interaction in this broader sense has scarcely gained notice in psychology, although psychiatry (Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry, 1954), anthropology (Lewis, 1950, 1959, 1961), sociology (Hill, 1949; Parsons and Bales, 1955), and social work (Voiland, 1962) are giving it increasing attention. Psychology has been concerned with events within the family but has made little effort to conceptualize and study the family as a unit.

This paper reports the progress made thus far in studying whole families. Attention is given to work by investigators and thinkers in psychology and related fields. The paper does not deal with two-person interaction, partly because discussions of work in this area are already available (Eisenstein, 1956; Hoffman and Lippitt, 1960; Tharp, 1963), but mainly because moving beyond the two-person framework has proved to be an especially difficult problem. The discussion is not restricted, however, to interaction in the sense of studies of face-to-face behavior. The problem focus is the psychological study of the family as a whole, and observation of face-to-face interaction is only one of the procedures that have been used. If the parent-child, cause-effect model has been only slightly successful, there are grounds for believing that studies of two-person, parent-child interaction, which omit observation of other family members, will also prove of limited value for understanding child personality. But quite apart from evaluations of the merit of two-person interaction studies in child psychology, the psychological study of whole families is of interest in its own right.

The adequacy, though not the utility, of the interaction concept—regardless of whether the data

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