Concordance of Children's Descriptions of Themselves and Their Parents as a Function of Intact Versus Divorced Families

Summary

Lifshitz proposed that children's self-concepts slowly evolve as a result of successive comparisons and contrasts between one's self and one's parents. In the wake of divorce, however, children's self-concepts were thought to gravitate toward the remaining parent and away from the absent parent. In the present study Lifshitz's model was examined. A total of 606 grade-school children were asked to check 15 of 48 adjectives on multiple copies of the Personal Attribute Inventory for Children which they considered descriptive of themselves, their mothers, and their fathers. Concordance scores were derived by counting what adjectives were and were not checked in common between self and father and between self and mother. The results indicated that the concordance score between self and mother was consistently high regardless of the family's configuration. The concordance score between self and fathers, however, did diminish progressively following parental divorce and then after the remaining parent's remarriage. These results generally supported Lifshitz's model.