Relationships between sons' feelings of being understood by their fathers and measures of the sons' psychological functioning.

Factor analysis of a questionnaire designed to measure a son's feeling of being understood by his father is reported. The questionnaire, which contained 12 paragraphs each purporting to be an aspect of the son's feeling of being understood by his father, was administered in small groups to a sample of 413 male college students along with three indices of son's level of general functioning--a self-concept scale, a somatic complaints inventory, and the degree of help-seeking behavior. Five interpretable factors were extracted from the data. The meaningfulness of the factors was substantiated by their significant correlations with certain of the other measures administered to the sample. Three of the factors were correlated positively (p less than .01) with Ss' self-concept, while two were correlated negatively (p less than .01) with the number of somatic complaints by the Ss'.