ABSTRACT
SUMMARY. Family therapists rely upon the comments and perspectives of individual family members to gain insight into family functioning. Frequently, each family member reports his/her own unique view of the family life, leaving it up to the therapist to sort out the discrepancies among the varying perspectives. Such perceptual discrepancy can be confusing and misleading to therapists as they try to develop a picture of family functioning. This study used the three dimensions of the Circumplex Model of Marital and Family Systems, and the reports of three family members to identify the characteristics of families where there was a high level of perceptual discrepancy. Perceptual patterns were also used to define and examine the effects of parent-child coalitions. The amount of discrepancy was found to be related to marital and family satisfaction, communication between spouses and between parents and children. Although detrimental to the entire family, the negative impact of cross-generational coalitions registered most strongly on the marital dyad.
