Abstract
Fourty-five psychologists were asked to sort 112 items describing various relationships between parents and children, following the method of equalappearing intervals (9-point-scale on ‘better-worse’ dimension). From these results 30 items were selected to form a stimulus scale. This scale was administered to urban high school pupils, their parents, and a few others. The Ss were instructed to express the degree of favorableness (i.e., their ideal evaluation) and of endorsement (i.e., their real evaluation) for each item in terms of a 9-pointscale.
1. Ideal evaluations (ISVs) did not differ with age and sex of the Ss irrespective of whether they were parents or children.
2. Real evaluations (RSVs) differed with age and sex of the Ss in certain cases of parent-child relationship: remarkable *differences were found with age, sex and parent-child relationship in a set of items representing ‘better’ parent-child relationship.
3. Relation between ISVs and RSVs varied with age, sex, and parent-child relationship: discrepancy between ISVs and RSVs was larger in younger and male groups than in older and female groups ; in the latter, ISVs and RSVs were almost consistent with each other.
4. When a child had a larger (or smaller) discrepancy between ISVs and RSVs, his parent also had a larger (or smaller) one.
5. Rank correlations between ISVs and RSVs were generally high in almost all groups.
To interpret the above results the concept of “social desirability” was applied for: older groups were much more influenced by social desirability than the younger. Thus the control of the social desirability variable was found to be necessary for establishing the methodology of studying parent-child relation- ship.
