夫婦生活の幸福度の豫測と測定

アメリカにおける家族研究の最近段階

抄録

Family stability is an important concern in modern society. In Japan, there has never been any predictive study concerning this problem. In order to stimulate Japanese scholars and case workers to undertake study of this problem it is desirable to know something of the nature of such studies in foreign countries, especially in the United States where most work has been done on the problem to date. This paper is limited to a review of research methods in the United States.
Such predictive studies can be classified into four types, according to the following two criteria.
A. Predication of probabilities of marital happiness from premarital factors, or prediction from marital conditions.
B. Prediction of probabilities of marital happiness by the use of other, methods, such as the post-facto, the cross-sectional, the follow-up and the longitudinal methods.
The nature of these techniques can be suggested in this manner;
1. Post-facto predictive studies from premarital experience.
2. Post-facto predictive studies from marital life.
3. Follow-up predictive studies from premarital life.
4. Follow-up predictive studies from marital life.
The following are the methodological problems dealt with in this article according to this classification.
1. The halo effect in post-facto studies.
2. The representative nature of samples.
3. Combinations of predictive items between husband and wife and configurations of predictive factors.
4. Reliability and validity of happiness scales and predictive scales.
5. Various problems in practice, etc. Finally, this paper treats, from the methodological and practical point of view, the relation between the method of statistical prediction and the method of prediction from case studies.