Patterns of Marriage

THE marriage relationships of two groups of 100 service men and their wives, normally resident in Greater London, are reviewed. All the men were hospital patients between 1943 and 1946. One group were admitted for neurotic illness (neurotic group) and the other for illness or injury without neurosis (control group). Data were collected by personal interview only from married couples who were willing to cooperate. In the author's opinion it is believed that the sample is "a fairly representative one of Londoners of working and lower middle class, married and between the ages of twenty-two and forty-seven. It contains a small excess of Jews, an inadequate representation of the most prosperous and the very poorest and is probably weighted in favour of those who are fairly happily married." It is important that the reader should fully appreciate these and other limitations of the data in the generalisations 198