The Career of the Military Wife

Abstract

The aim of this study is to investigate the phenomenon of a wife's psychological identification with her husband's career: her identification with the social role of "wife of' a member of a particular occupational group. The particular occupational group studied was the Australian military. The study isolated the wife's identification with the husband's career (WI) as a variable, and then developed and tested a model of the determination of a wife's identification. The concept of WI was derivedfrom Finch's (1983) research on the wives of British middle class professionals, and provides an empirical test of some of Finch's propositions about the determination of WI. A model of WI was developed by analogy to studies of the determination of psychological identification with an occupational career. Data were derived from responses to a questionnaire survey of male officers and wives/partners of the Australian Navy, Army, and Air Force, in the rank range lieutenant to colonel, or equivalents. WI and most other variables were measured by scores on Likert scales. A multiple regression analysis of the wives' data (N = 815) showed that WI is a function of the woman's assessment of her quality of family life, her sex-role image or support for feminist values, her age, and her husband's career involvement. Overall, 41% of the variance in WI was explained. The transposition of occupational-career models to family-career models shows theoretical promise.

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