Role Perceptions in Wives of Alcoholics and of Nonalcoholics

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Abstract
This study is one of a series which seeks to demonstrate whether a special modal personality type can be isolated and designated as "the personality of the wife of an alcoholic." Earlier studies have suggested that the personality of the wife might be viewed as an important variable rather than a constant. The role expectations and perceptions of a group of 40 wives of alcoholics were compared with those of a group of 40 wives of nonalcoholics in experimental and replication samples. Each subject completed the La Forge and Suczek Interpersonal Check List according to six different instructions. A number of different scores and measures were systematically examined for the experimental groups. Only those scores which yielded sig- nificant differences between the experimental samples were computed for the replication groups; only those differences which were significant at the .05 level or better in both experimental and replication samples are reported as positive findings. There were no significant differences in concepts which referred to role expectation, "Ideal Wife" and "Most Husbands." However, wives of alcoholics more frequently than wives of nonalcoholics perceived their own husbands, whether drinking or not, as being socially undesirable, lacking in emotional warmth, and characterized by such traits as being gloomy, distrustful, bitter and resentful. Their self-descriptions were differentiated by their stress on passivity, submissiveness and adherence to the stereotyped feminine and wifely roles. In the light of the total ongoing research it was anticipated that those characteristics which appear to differentiate one group of subjects from another on a group basis will ultimately prove to be related to some more specific aspect of the wife''s life situation which will account for the occurrence of the deviant responses in certain individuals and not in others.