Matt Thorpe and Chelsea Bennett with Dr. Randal Day – Marriage, Family and Human Development

Family scientists created the Oral History Interview to assess the quality of marriage relationships based on an open ended, narrative style history. The theory behind these methods suggests that this kind of interview assessment may work equally well with other kinds of relationships. This study extends the Oral History Interview’s use to measuring an adult child’s perceptions of the relationship with his father. Many of the same basic attitudes and interactions that affect the quality of a marriage also play into father-child relationships. Furthermore our study suggests that children will look to their parents’ marriages as a model for their own relationships.

Over 2004 our research team extended the Oral History Interview (or OHI) to individual interviews. Before this the OHI had only measured relationship quality based on a couple interview – husband and wife interviewed together. We learned that the interview measured something more than simply the way the couple interacted. Husbands and wives, even when interviewed separately, used language, tone and anecdotes that revealed how happy they felt in their marriages. Most importantly, the type and mood of the memories they recalled in the interviews seemed to show their feelings about the relationship and its particular challenges and strengths.

This study left us with more questions. The OHI focuses on seven specific dimensions of a relationship to predict marital quality. The accuracy of these measures has been tried and verified in multiple studies. Were the aspects that tied in to marital quality in the OHI universal, or were they only true of marriages? Do we view the quality of a relationship in terms of the quality of our past memories, or do we remember our histories in a more positive or negative light depending on our current satisfaction with the relationship? This study, which has taken place over 2005, set out to help answer these questions, as well as to help us understand a different kind of relationship – father and child.

Based loosely on the original OHI on marriages, we wrote several open ended questions which encouraged participants to recall and relate memories about their relationships with and overall feelings toward their fathers. We recruited thirty volunteers and recorded this new oral history interview with them, each one lasting between thirty and forty-five minutes. We also asked them to fill out a survey – the Affectional Solidarity Scale. We chose this survey as it had been tested and verified as a solid measure of relationship quality for parents and children previously. We also looked for themes in the interviews that were not necessarily addressed by the coding system for the OHI.

Statistics showed a very good match between overall results of the OHI and the score on the Affectional Solidarity Scale. The two scores correlated at a highly significant 74.4%, indicating that both methods measured relationship quality similarly. When broken down by dimensions, however, we discovered some interesting differences between father child and couple measures.

In couples, expansiveness was a very important indicator of relationship quality. Expansiveness refers to the enthusiasm and depth expressed by a person while talking about memories of the relationship. In parent-child relationships, expansiveness was barely correlated at all to relationship quality, and this small correlation may likely have simply occurred by chance. The first plausible explanation for this was that expansiveness was lost by interviewing a child without the father present – without the interaction, the enthusiasm may be absent. However in our former study we interviewed husbands and wives separately and expansiveness remained a good predictor of satisfaction. It appears that expansiveness holds a fundamentally different importance in parent-child versus husband-wife relationships.

Also, in couples, the strongest predictor of overall relationship quality was disappointment in the relationship, followed by fondness expressed for the other person. In father-child relationships the most influential variable was a chaotic relationship. Participants who rated these relationships as being uncontrollable, out of their hands, and a struggle to maintain had significantly poorer relationships with their fathers, even poorer than those who felt bitter or disappointed about the relationship.

Volatility – the intensity of disagreements and of the relationship in general – was also a stronger predictor for poor father-child than for poor couple relationships. The remaining dimensions – negativity, fondness, glorifying the struggle and disappointment – were comparable to our results with couples. While these findings are statistically accurate, we express them with the caveat that our data analysis is still underway, and moderating influences or underlying problems with these results may be uncovered.

Finally, on a more descriptive note, we noticed that children used their fathers’ relationship with their mothers as a standard for judging the quality of a relationship. Respondents generally hoped for a marriage that was quite similar or quite dissimilar to their parents’ marriage. A child’s expectations for a marriage may be influenced by the marriage of his parents more than other influences.

We cannot overstate the importance of this project in our undergraduate education. Chelsea comments that she has learned more about family science in these interviews than in any of her family science coursework. Matt likewise comments that he has learned graduate level research techniques and skills as an undergraduate. Most critical to this learning has been the committed and expert mentoring of Dr. Randy Day. These lessons and skills make each of us an outstanding graduate school applicant, and are already beginning to open doors to highly competitive and well funded graduate programs. Matt has received interview invitations from four high end medical schools so far, and is waiting for another four. These schools have expressed interest in his unique research experiences. Chelsea plans to apply to Marriage and Family Therapy graduate training as she draws closer to graduation.