1 The purpose of the study
The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between having authoritarian personality and being a housewife living in a situation together with old parents.
2 Sampling
The respondents were the wives of men aged between 26 and 65 years living in the Kanto area. They were drawn through a random probability sampling method. The 418 respondents represented a 80.2% completion rate of the original sample. Some 74 respondents lived with their husband's parent (s) and 20 lived with their own parents.
3 Analysis
From the initial comparison of average authoritarian scores we can conclude that housewives who live or had lived with husband's parent (s) are more authoritarian than those who had not. The next question is the correlation is spurious or not. We examined whether living with old parent (s) had a direct effect on authoritarian personality using path analyses.
The findings of these analyses show that to live together with husband's parents has independent direct effect on authoritarian personality.
4 Discussion and Conclusion
But still we have many things left to elaborate in these relationships. There is some possibility that more authoritarian women accept to marry with eldest sons and tend to live with husband's parents. This means wife's personality is not the result of living together with husband's parents but the cause of it. As for the claims that Japan is a society in which conformity and obedience to authority are characteristic norms, we can conclude that patri-lineal families are playing some part in reproducing these values.