ABSTRACT
The importance to the psychiatrist of investigations of family life and relationships no longer needs arguing. Much of psychiatric theory is concerned with the role of abnormal family structure or deviant parental attitudes and behaviour in the genesis of psychiatric disorder. Mental illness may have deleterious effects on the rest of the family through the direct social effects of certain symptoms, by alterations in the balance of family activities and structure and through adverse effects on interpersonal relationships. Attitudes to child rearing, for example, have been assessed from a number of different approaches including questionnaires, self-ratings and interviews. The measures of family life and relationships which we have developed over the last three years have been primarily designed to study the interaction between illness and family variables. Thus an important aspect of this reliability and validity study has been an examination of the effects on reporting of the informant's status of psychiatric patient.
