Family Role Specialization and Self-Affitudes in Childer.

For those social psychologists subscribing to self-role theory, the proposition that the self arises through interaction is a crucial one. In the past few years there have been several procedures developed to put into operational form the concepts "self" and "role," thereby rendering them useful in the formulation of empirical propositions. One of these, the Twenty Statements Test (TST), has been validated by the demonstration that dimensions of the self, abstracted from responses to the TST, are related to other aspects of behavior. In addition, Kuhn has found professional training, age, and sex to be related to the nature of the self as measured by the TST, while McPartland and Cumming report a relationship between social class and self-conception. The research reported here is a limited attempt to investigate a relationship between the role structure of a group and the way members of the group define themselves. Specifically, this research attempts to discern relationships between the role structure within families and the self-identifications of children of the families. That such relationships should prevail derives from our awareness that the family is a pervasive group in our society, and that the development and maintenance of the self for most individuals depends in large part upon the interaction that occurs within the family group. As families differ in structure this difference should be reflected in the ways children define themselves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]