DO PEOPLE WHO MARRY REALLY HAVE THE SAME LEVEL OF DIFFERENTIATION OF SELF

In a test of M. Bowen's hypothesis that people marry at the same level of differentiation of self, both members of 36 heterosexual couples c ompleted the Personal Authority in the Family System Questionnaire (PA FS-Q). The similarity of the actual couples' scores was compared with the similarity of randomly formed couples across 1,000 Monte Carlo rep lications of the pseudocouple methodology for each of 7 PAFS-Q variabl es. Several indexes of couple similarity averaged across the replicati ons revealed that the members of the actual couples were more similar than the members of the pseudocouples on just 1 of the spousal measure s and none of the measures of intergenerational relationships. In gene ral, these findings do not support the Bowen hypothesis.