Marital similarity in socio-economic attitudes

Abstract

Parents of freshmen at the University of Akron and parents of children in an Akron high school composed the two groups whose attitudes to socio-economic stimuli were determined. They indicated attitude by crossing out disliked items of religious, political, or economic bearing, such as "communist, spiritualist," etc., and by approving or disapproving on a 5-point scale statements of opinion such as "the U.S. should have the largest military and naval air fleets in the world." Tetrachoric correlations were computed, to show the degree of agreement between husband and wife on each attitude item. These ranged from .10 to .93 for the first group of parents and from .08 to .95 for the second group. There was no substantial agreement between the two groups as to similarity or dissimilarity of attitude in husband and wife. The author believes that person-to-person influences are of greater importance in determining marital agreement than are the influences of common institutions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)