The Occurrence and Sequence of Events in the Adjustment of Families to Alcoholism

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Abstract
A study of 116 families in the Sacramento, California, area by means of a 49 item schedule disclosed that over 50% of the cases involved marriages in which a drinking problem or alcoholism was already established. Study of selected items of interactional behavior associated with the drinking problems revealed an over-all occurrence of 70%, with a variation for individual items from 48 to 97%. The effort to discover or verify the presence of a common sequence of events in family adjustments to the crises of alcoholism was generally unsuccessful. Adjustment events were found to "cluster" rather than to fall into well-defined stages. The nature of clustering suggests that there may be early, middle and late phases in such family adjustments. Further research on this problem, should begin with the courtship period rather than marriage.