Casual attributions, life events and perceived social support of wives of alcoholic men

Women married to alcoholic men are often at risk for experiencing psychiatric symptomology. In order to describe and analyze factors contributing to symptomology, 98 women were recruited from five facilities where their husbands were currently undergoing treatment for alcoholism. They completed five instruments: the Life Experiences Survey, the Perceived Social Support Questionnaire, the Attribution Questionnaire, the Symptom Checklist-90, and a page of sociodemographic questions labeled Fact Sheet. It was hypothesized that stressful life events would be associated with greater psychological distress but that perceptions of social support would mitigate these effects. It was additionally hypothesized that psychiatric symptomology would be correlated with a pattern of causal attributions characterized by a focus on internal, stable, and global factors. Data were analyzed by correlational and multiple regression methods. Results indicated a positive correlation between stressful life events and personal symptomology (p < .0001), while high levels of social support from both friends (p < .01) and family (p < .05) were negatively correlated with psychological distress. The tendency to make global attributions for negative events—that is, to believe that causes of a specific event also influence other aspects of life—was highly correlated with psychological dysfunction (p < .001). Symptomology, however, was not related to causal attributions that emphasize stable or internal factors. Multiple regression (p < .0001) indicated that 30% of the variance in psychological dysfunction could be explained in descending order of significance by negative life events, perceived social support from friends, global causal attributions, and perceived social support from family.