title: Family adjustment, parental attitudes, and social desirability.
abstract: This study examines the role of social desirability response set on the report of marital adjustment, child adjustment, and parenting attitudes. Results from 69 married couples closely replicate previous self-report findings suggesting that the more positive the report of marital adjustment, the fewer the number of child problem behaviors endorsed by parents (r = -.19(69), p less than .05). When social desirability is controlled, however, the marital-child adjustment relationship is nonsignificant. Previous reports of a global relationship between marital and child adjustment may have been inflated by individual differences in willingness to endorse problems on self-report measures. Parenting attitudes are not associated with social desirability or marital adjustment. Warmth, but not authoritarianism, is negatively correlated with child behavior problems in the home (r = -.25(69), p less than .01). The authors propose that family interaction research use a multimethod strategy to focus on circumscribed variables that influence marital and parenting behavior.
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D001290:Attitude; D002648:Child; D002652:Child Behavior; D002668:Child Rearing; D002675:Child, Preschool; D005190:Family; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008393:Marriage; D010290:Parents / Q000523:psychology; D011594:Psychometrics; D012650:Self Disclosure; D012917:Social Adjustment