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Blood and Wolfe's theory of resources in marital decision-making was tested in a survey of American and Danish urban families. In both countries, marital power was neither consistently nor always positively correlated with the resources (family income or occupation) brought into the marriage by each spouse. However, wife's employment, whether part-time or fulltime, contributed to her increased power within the household. The importance of socioeconomic resources for marital decision-making may not derive primarily from the availability of financial and status rewards as much as from the opportunities for gaining experience in interpersonal and decision-making skills outside the family which an individual can then utilize within the family. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An examination was made of the nature of parent-adolescent interactions in the United States and Denmark, the independence which adolescents experience in both countries, and the association between family patterns and feelings of independence. Data were analyzed from a survey of 2,327 American and 1,552 Danish adolescents. While the United States and Denmark are characterized by different distributions of family patterns, the interrelationship among these patterns and the consequence for adolescent socialization follow similar trends in both countries. The authoritarian pattern of decision-making between parent and child is the one most frequently observed in the United States, while the democratic is the modal family pattern in Denmark. American parents treat their adolescents as children longer than Denmark. It is speculated that these different family patterns in adolescence may be related to differences in early child-rearing methods between the two countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]