RESEARCH COMMUNICATIONS.

In the United States, the mother's employment has been studied not only with a developmental approach as a variable related to the child's behavior but also with an interaction approach. This latter approach is one of the most attractive for the family sociologist, because the family group is an excellent place to study the functioning of a multiple network of roles and overlapping relations either within the couple or in the parent-child community. The wife's employment is particularly useful in a comparative study of the interaction between couples with working wives and those with housewives. It is this latter approach, which will be used, in the following paper. the decision making process, the household task performance and the family planning realization will be studied in French couples with regard to the wife's employment. The household tasks in the family included here are first the budget management and the performance of several other tasks such as the cleaning of dishes, and floors, the purchasing of clothes, comparative shopping in department stores before the purchase of furniture or of electrical appliances, other shopping, letter writing, arrangement of the living room when entertaining friends, preparing the income tax return, etc. Nine of these household tasks have been included in a score of household task performance in the French survey, budget management was studied separately. However all these items are not comparable to those included in the American household task performance score because the way of life is different in the two countries.