The Adjustment of Married Offspring to their Parents

THIS report derives from preliminary phases of a larger research into the relations of married offspring and their parents, one aspect of which deals with the mutual adjustment of inter-generational pairs. For this latter purpose, it was necessary to construct an index of married offspring-parent adjustment.1 The data to be presented here were gathered in an attempt to secure information bearing of the reliability and validity of this instrument. The initial section of the paper considers the construction and properties of the index, along with the characteristics of the persons responding to it. Then, findings are reported which relate the adjustment of married offspring to their parents, own and affinal, to the following: (1) offsprings reported dependence upon parents; (2) offspring's own status as parent or non-parent; (3) age of offspring; and (4) length of offsprings marriage. The major portion of the findings concerns the relationship between offspring adjustment to parent and reported dependence upon parent. These data are brought to focus upon a hypothesis offered by Komarovsky, who has suggested that as a consequence of females being more attached to and dependent upon families of orientation than males, in-law problems in marriage will more frequently involve the wife's parents than the husband's.2 The Adjustment Index. The index constructed consisted of a check list of items subsumable under the four categories: af-