The Clinical Use of Social System Theory in Marriage Counseling

Psychological patterning in marriage.

M ARRIAGE RESEARCH has been handicapped by the lack of an empirical description of marriage roles. Consequently, researchers have trudged through a thicket of unorganized variables, or swung on ropes of unverified assumptions. The purpose of this study was to provide a description of marriage-roles, based on empirical methods and data, in terms of "dimensions." Such a dimensional description would suggest something of the structure of marriage roles. In addition, it would provide a scheme for measuring the role patterns of marriages. An empirically derived dimensional structure will tell us not only what to measure in marriage research, but how to measure it. At present, we are burdened with a bewildering plethora of marriage-role expectations and behaviors. We know that spouses are parents, cooks or breadwinners, family treasurers. We know they are lovers and companions to one another. We know that some wives obey and others command. Some wives burn the toast, and some husbands kiss them goodbye in the mornings nevertheless. Marriages have social and recreational and procreational functions. Marriages are blissful or miserable, or sometimes merely tedious. Literally thousands of such possibilities might be listed, and hundreds have been investigated by social science. Yet we still do not know how these masses of "raw" variables organize themselves into stable patterns of marriage relationships. Indeed, we do not yet know what the patterns themselves might be. An analytic technique exists which is ideal for solving these problems: factor analysis. This technique groups variables together because they "behave" in the same way; from these groupings, new entities may be synthesized. These new entities-the factors-are fewer in number than the initial raw variables, and can be used as "hypothetical causes, intervening constructs, or independent influences behind the more numerous and bewildering

Dimensions of Marriage Roles

The stillbirth of a baby occurs in about 1 in 110 families yearly. Yet, little is understood about the ways in which grieving mothers and fathers experience the baby's death. This study is intended to explore the ways in which bereaved parents perceive and cope with the death of their baby and how the baby's death affects them both individually and as a couple. Respondents answered open-ended questions about their experiences. Results suggest that mothers and fathers grieve individually and collectively, struggling to find meaning in their losses. Responses to a baby's death may depend, in part, on the parent's gender, as well as on the individual's locus of control, couple and family cohesion, the degree of attachment to the baby, and social support. The death of a baby may create conflict in a marital dyad, yet many couples also experience a greater sense of closeness. A therapeutic relationship that is nonhierarchical and egalitarian, focusing on “keeping the therapist close to the experience ...

Stillbirth and the Couple: A Gender-Based Exploration

.family violence, can be applied to clinical practice. The analysis is based on ten years of research on family violence and a one-year clinical position in a teaching hospital which included diagnostic and therapeutic work in the Department of Psychiatry and an interdisciplinary outpatient clinic. Limitations of the knowledge base constrain the application of research on family violence to clinical work. Moreover, certain aspects of the research paradigm also limit the transfer of research knowledge to clinical practice. Nevertheless, it was found that certain conceptual frameworks, especially exchange theory, could be successfully applied to diagnostic and therapeutic work with violent families. A research background also enhanced and sharpened the diagnostic focus.

Applying Research on Family Violence to Clinical Practice.

When sociology emerged as a discipline in the United States after the Civil War and Reconstruction, the nation was struggling with issues of democracy and social justice. The era of Jim Crow was upon us, blacks were being lynched,* women were still without the vote, and there was rural and urban poverty. Farmers and workers in the late 1800s could see the centralization of economic and political power in the hands of limited groups of people. Frustration led to public protests and the development of reform organizations. In this environment, it is not surprising to find that many of the early sociologists were interested in solving or at least reducing the pressing social problems confronting their communities.

The Clinical Use of Social System Theory in Marriage Counseling

Citations

Psychological patterning in marriage.

Dimensions of Marriage Roles

Stillbirth and the Couple: A Gender-Based Exploration

Applying Research on Family Violence to Clinical Practice.

The Emergence of American Clinical Sociology

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