Uta Gerhardt

Research note: the roles of the wife and

marital reality construction in the narrative
interview: conceptual models in qualitative
data interpretation

It has often been maintained that qualitative research needs no analytical

concepts to structure its approach to social reality (Schwartz and Jacobs
1979, Strauss 1987). The categories used in data interpretation are said to
emerge from interplay between first-hand data gathered in the field
(through interviews or otherwise) and researchers' diligent effort to make
sense of them by condensing them into 'basic social processes' (Glaser
1978), using evidence from extensive case comparisons (Denzin 1978,
Bertaux 1981, Emerson 1983). The underlying credo of this literature is
that excerpts from case material properly document the nature of a case,
and also that the typicality of the case is incontroversial since it can be
demonstrated using selective material taken from the narrative data. In
research reports and publications, excerpts from verbatim transcripts are
thus meant to epitomise the analytical types or empirical categories into
which the case material belongs.
The following research note is based on the observation that the
abundant material collected in narrative interviews is often so comprehensive
that classification of cases under ready-made categories appears almost
arbitrary. Different judgements may appear possible, due to different
conceptual images of the phenomenon that is studied, and different
dimensions of the subject area may be outlined due to different knowledge
interests followed. Such variability of analytical perspectives could be a
transient by-product of social change, when an object of study such as
marital role structure moves from a 'traditional' to a 'modern' form. But
there may also be an opportunity to refiect upon the use of analytical
concepts in the interpretation of data elicited in narrative interviews.
The theme focused on is family coping with a man/husband/father's
chronic illness. The wife's role as contributing to marital reality construction is
a particularly suitable topic since the scope of individuality attributed to
women has changed in society as well as in sociology over the last two
decades. This raises the question how the interpretation of narrative
interviews with couples in cases of a husband's chronic illness deals with
the analytical task of understanding the wife's role(s).
Sociology of Health & Illness Vol. 13 No. 3 1991 ISSN 0141-9889
412 Uta Gerhardt

Three conceptual images of marriage

Until the middle 1980s, wives' contribution to their chronically ill

husbands' disease management was regarded as supplementary to the
husband's breadwinner role in typically male-dominated marriages. In this
vein, research either focused on adequacy or inadequacy of the wives'
coping in terms of the type and degree of support given to their husbands
(Dyk and Sutherland 1956, Snell et al 1964, Katz 1976, Croog et al 1976);
or repercussion of the husbands' condition on the wives' physical or mental
wellbeing were investigated (Shambaugh et al 1967, Croog and Fitzgerald
1978, Stern and Pascale 1979, Fengler and Goodrich 1979, Schott and
Badura 1988). The underlying image of marriage was that of reciprocity
between spouses, representing separate - equal or unequal - realms of
functioning. Namely, the husbands' responsibility for the instrumental side
of marital adaptation was typically contrasted with the wives' task of
managing its expressive side.
This image of marriage has been challenged on the grounds of women's
individuality. The feminine role has become exposed as a source of
exploitation of women. Their habitual rendering of support and care to
chronically or acutely sick members of their families, or their supportive
and caring work in hospitals and other medical settings, have been
revealed as de-humanising tasks indicative of their traditionally subservient
social status (Oakley 1981, Kickbusch 1981, Belle 1982, Lewin and Olesen
1986, Summers 1988). The underlying image is that of female individuality
as equal to that of men in the context of work and family.
While the individualist notion of women's identity may represent the
outcome of the century-old process of civilisation (Norbert Elias) having
finally reached the lives of the hitherto underprivileged gender, individualism
itself may not only be a personal achievement but also a cultural
construction. This means that while the value of the individual is stressed
throughout, levels of analysis in sociology go beyond the individual person
or member. In this vein, reciprocity between individuals who support and
supplement each other in social relations is emphasised as a feature of
families, workplaces, etc in modern society. Concerning life-style and
biographical management of members of 'modern individualist societies',
writes J. W. Meyer advocating life-course analysis, 'the point of view of the
individual is highly developed ideologically and valued socially; in fact, the
collective good is defined in terms of individual development and welfare'
(1988: 50). The individualist standpoint recently adopted in the sociology
of women merges into a perspective of reciprocal relationships in the
sociology of marriage. Accordingly, since the late 1970s, research on
conjugal roles has repeatedly stressed the impact of each spouse's
commitment and attitudes on the other's occupational and emotional
situation (Oppenheimer 1977, Richardson 1979, Hiller and Philliber 1982,
 Research note: Marital reality construction 413
Radley and Green 1986). When studying the dyad as the unit of analysis, as
Thompson and Walker emphasise, the 'real issue' becomes 'understanding
the relationship between the two people' (1982: 889).
This view of marriage as a role structure of interlocked commitments has
been used to document shifts of decision rules between husbands and wives
(Blood and Wolfe 1960), as well as the relative stability of unequal
distribution of household tasks among spouses despite women's increased
involvement in the labour market (Bertram and Borrmann-Muller 1988).
The general line of argument in such research is to assign equal credibility
to the wife's and husband's accounts of their marital life, and to find both
spouses' standpoint and outlook equally justified (whereas previous
research tended to favour the husband's over the wife's view, particularly
when he was the patient). Focusing on "the relationship between the two
people' also introduced a process-oriented perspective into research; for
instance, Finlayson and McEwen (1977) investigated the wife's social
support as a process of changing the type and intensity of care and concern
following a husband's myocardial infarction, and Speedling (1982) analysed
family coping following the same medical event as a process of successive
stages. Thus, due to the realisation during the last two decades of women's
individuality, the sociological notion of the structure of marriage has
adopted a relationship view (focusing on two inter-related individuals),
and it incorporates dynamic aspects of life-course, development and
change.
However, sociology has also furnished evidence over the last thirty years
that marriage is more than an institutionalised role relationship linking two
persons who in principle are to be understood as individuals. Phenomeno-
logical sociology has argued since the 1960s that the construction of reality
in marital dyads is more than and different from establishing reciprocal
relationships between two individuals. Berger and Kellner (1964) emphasise
that marriage is a nomic institution, ie merges knowledge horizons, life
course and projections of the future (and past) of both partners so that a
jointly objective world ensues - not merely two parallel concatenated
subjective worlds:
Marriage thus creates a new reality. However, the individual's
relationship with this new reality is dialectical - he produces it, in
conjunction with the spouse - and it reacts upon him. The two realities
of the spouses are thus merged into one (Berger and Kellner 1964/1979:
84).'
The constitutive process of reciprocity of perspectives was originally
documented by Alfred Schutz (1932/1967) as a prerequisite of social life
and social order.^ Its viability for young marriages was documented by
research investigating 'Strategies of Reduction of Role Conflict of Working
Wives' conducted by Hahn and his associates in the 1970s. The idea is that
husband and wife (or any member of a social dyad or relationship)
414 Uta Gerhardt
presuppose that each other's attitudes toward their partner or toward other
relevant issues are either identical or complement each other. Thus,
perspectives are conceived of as interchangeable, and they constitute one
and the same world of marital reality. Using evidence from separate
interviews with young spouses, Hahn (1983) shows that they frequently
perceive full mutual compatibility of their views on male and female role
tasks while, in fact, they often disagree considerably with the views actually
held by their spouses (as elicited in separate interviews). However, marital
conflict rarely arises out of such dualist constellations, due to the
objectivity mechanism of marital reality construction described by Berger
and Kellner (1964). In this vein, marriage creates a unitary social reality
constructed between two partners jointly adopting a unitary stance vis-a-
vis the outside world. Marriage thus emerges as ongoing adaptive meaning
construction, through which the spouses react to changes of internal and
external conditions while constantly legitimating their claim to competence
and respectability as a (functioning or to-be-established) family.
Some aspects of such marital reality construction in the case of chronic
illness or disability have been discussed in the literature since the 1970s.
Families with a disabled member (ie to whom a disabled child has been
born), Voysey (1975) argues, claim normality as a family and legitimise it
against their apparent deviation; in the interview situation, she shows, they
produce accounts that redress the balance of respectability and morality.
The interviewer comes to accept these families' normality inasmuch as in
the interview their members together produce an impression of credibility
which makes them comparable to any other family. Regarding verbal
strategies accomplishing accounts of biographical explanation of chronic
illness, Williams (1984) argues that narrative reconstruction is used in
individual interviews to legitimise any actual status quo. Not enough is
known, however, about how couples produce their joint account of a
spouse's chronic illness as an accomplishment of marital reality construction.
It is likely that, in the same way that individual accounts attempt to prove a
chronically sick person's normality as a social actor (Gerhardt 1989),
interviews with couples equally reveal the impetus to create an impression
of their marital dyad as a competent and rational actor in their social
world.
To sum up, three conceptual images of marriage may be found in the
sociological literature on families living with chronic illness. One is the
traditional equilibrium model where husband's and wife's roles are divided
along the line of instrumental versus expressive tasks, with the wife's
obligations in case of the husband's major illness being conceived of as
subservient to the husband's well-being. The second model may be named
the relationship model where the spouses are perceived as individuals
related to each other through marriage; their definitions of the situation
are given equal weight when the wives' coping with their husband's illness
is analysed. The third model may be called that of reality construction.
 Research note: Marital reality construction 415
focusing on spouses' establishing a unified image of past and future where
both enact a joint interpretation of their social world in an interview
situation.
Evaluation of the wife's role in marriage is the crucial point where the
three models differ. While the equilibrium model allows for dependency as
well as dominance of either partner (with the wife's dominance often
judged as a deviant marital structure), the relationship model allows for
both perspectives being regarded separately. The wife's individuality may
then be highlighted in both her employment and homemaker roles as
reasonable outcomes of previous biographical process in the marriage. On
the other hand, the reality construction model would not allow for a
distinct recognition of the wife's as opposed to the husband's role
performance. Both would be seen as a united front of self-presentation of
the marriage. In interview material, the wife's contribution to illness-
management of her husband's condition may then no longer be classified as
de-individualising or de-humanising. Even if her role vis-a-vis the
functioning of the family involves more work and possibly more sacrifices
than that of her husband, she is not regarded as a victim of unequal
expectation patterns. She is understood as presenting herself in the
interview situation, together with her husband, as taking on a shared
burden of maintenance of family life.

Family rehabilitation and illness management

The wife's role in family coping comprises two aspects of management of

a husband/father's chronic illness that go beyond the emotional support
frequently analysed in the literature (Badura et al 1987, Anderson and
Bury 1988).
One is family rehabilitation, ie the re-establishment of a family's
economic livelihood and social status that may be threatened due to the
husband/father's major illness and/or disability. Family rehabilitation as a
joint endeavour of the spouses has been investigated in a study of end-
stage renal failure (Gerhardt 1985, 1986, 1990, 1991). The idea is that the
socio-economic existence of the family as a household unit of living is
upheld by change or continuity of the division of labour between the
spouses, who together secure procurement of income as well as home-
making. In the study of end-stage renal failure which comprised the total
number of male married working-age cases who had been treated for up to
three years in South-East England, slightly over 40 per cent returned to the
traditional divide between husband-provider and wife-homemaker (often
employed part-time), and an additional 17 per cent were unemployed at
the outset of their patient careers, with a similar marital pattern. But over
40 per cent were marriages where the wife was equal to her husband as
breadwinner, or had even become exclusive provider. These were either
416 Uta Gerhardt
dual-career marriages or what was called wife-centred families where
husbands had often taken over extensive household responsibilities. It
seems that it has rarely been noticed in the literature that the proportion of
fully employed wives is higher in the population where the husband is
chronically ill than for the general population.
The other aspect of marriage is illness management. This relates to
division of labour between the spouses regarding control over the
husband's symptoms and illness behaviour. Corbin and Strauss (1987)
argue that chronic illness becomes biographically accommodated by
marital couples, and they distinguish between four 'critical issues in
relation to biography':
These involve: first, body, conceptions of self and biographical time.
Second, action performance. Third, the impact of disrupted, impeded,
or changed action-performance. Fourth: the biographical work that must
be performed to accommodate to body failure (1987: 251).
From this vantage point, Thonnessen (1989) outlines three constellations
of marital responsibility for a husband/patient's illness management. First,
the wife may be habitual gatekeeper of health care in the family, and in this
function she assumes control over her husband's medication, diet,
exercise, etc; the husband accepts her role as expert on his physical
condition. Second, both partners may share responsibility for the manage-
ment of the husband's illness, with varying degrees of wife-centred or
husband-centred control of the husband's physical rehabilitation, and also
with more or less marital conflict over issues of illness behaviour. Third,
the patient alone may take on the task of monitoring his symptoms and
adapting his life-style to reduced levels of exhaustion or risk-taking
(eg through cessation of smoking, etc); the wife's role, in this case, is
confined to accepting her husband's control of his body and illness.
The two dimensions of marital coping with chronic illness, ie family
rehabilitation and illness management, may serve as topic areas to focus on
wives' roles. For instance, if a wife has taken over her husband's body
control, the resultant dominance of the wife could be aggravated by the
fact that she is occupationally equal to him in a dual-career marriage, or
her superiority over him may even become enhanced through his inability
to return to work. In contrast, if a husband acquires full control over his
illness management and also remains sole breadwinner of the family, the
wife's roles may mean dependency on, if not inferiority to, those of her
husband. A case of joint illness management has been described by
Sprenger and von Grote (1988), who document a case of marital conflict
following husband's myocardial infarction. The wife keeps worrying that
her husband might exhaust himself when working in the garden while the
husband deliberately does strenuous work in order to prove to himself (and
her?) that he is capable; the couple's economic situation depends on the
return to work of the husband who is the breadwinner.
 Research note: Marital reality construction 417

Data and method of analysis

The following is a single case study documenting how the three conceptual
models of marriage can each be corroborated by evidence provided in a
couple's interview prior to husband's coronary artery bypass surgery. The
case material is in fact the first of three interviews conducted over a two-
year period with one of 36 couples where the patient is a pre-operatively
employed, married recipient of coronary artery grafting.'^ The study's
overall aim is to explain discrepancies between medical and occupational
rehabilitation as an outcome of family rehabilitation, illness management
and explanations of atherosclerosis and/or myocardial infarction; these are
elicited in interviews with patient couples as well as their physicians and
analysed on a case-by-case basis, comparing two cohorts operated on some
ten years apart (Gerhardt and Thonnessen 1990).
The interviews loosely follow a guideline of topics structuring a
conversation-like encounter between the spouses and a medical sociologist
interviewer (who in the case discussed is himself a physician). The material
is tape-recorded and either transcribed or paraphrased, with particular
emphasis on who tells what in the interview, and whether information is
solicited by the interviewer or told spontaneously. The narrative quality of
the material is documented in detail through data processing. The latter
follows Mishler's principle that stories told in interviews represent a
patient's life-world; therefore, they ought to be taken as accounts
evidencing competence as a (rational, moral) actor in the interviewee's
social circumstances (Mishler 1984). Mishler (1986,a,b) also provides a
format of how an interview text may be broken down into thematic units
composed of line-by-line statements; these are shown to often have
storyable character, and thematic units are taken frequently to exhibit the
four-phase structure of fully-fledged stories as outlined by Labov and
Waletzky (1967), and Labov (1972).

The case and the stories

The patient is a 52-year-old service manager living in a self-built home with

his 49-year-old wife who is a registered psychiatric nurse working full-time.
Of their three sons aged 29-21 years, the oldest who is unmarried is a
student at a nearby Technical College and lives at home, while the
youngest has signed up with the army. The middle son Otto is married with
a young child and lives in a village not far away; he recently lost his job and
got into financial difficulties since his wife does not go out to work and he is
sole provider. The patient has a long history of cardiac problems but these
are not immediately revealed in the interview. Rather, he claims in the
initial part of the interview that he had no symptoms prior to a suspected
418 Uta Gerhardt
myocardial infarction, shortly before his atherosclerosis was diagnosed,
which led to his being scheduled for bypass surgery.
The three stories reproduced here give evidence of a marital relationship
that can be understood using classifications derived from all three
conceptual models outlined above. That is. Story A pictures the wife as
taking control of her husband's illness management; she acts in a nurse-like
fashion and even protects him against the interviewer (when the latter
points out a discrepancy between the medical record, indicating that two
vessels are diseased, and the patient's statement that only one coronary
artery is affected by atherosclerosis). Story B gives further evidence of the
wife's management of her husband's illness, revealing a long previous
history of the husband's denial of his serious symptoms - even supported
by two physicians - which makes her taking care of his illness appear
rational and responsible. Story C goes beyond both viewpoints; while
family rehabilitation (dual-career marriage with husband's employment
jeopardised) did not come into focus in stories A and B, it now comes to
the forefront as marital accomplishment.

Story A: Wife as dominant concerned caretaker of the husband's condition'*

P: Hypertension I've had for thirty years already
was treated with drugs
then it was okay (.)
and (.) then it started before Christmas
there was a cardiac cramp
then then my wife sent me to the doctor
who then made a thing eh ECG
then he found that in his opinion it was a myocardial infarction
which at the University Hospital they say it was not (/: hmh)
circulation problems
yes
and then the tests were then all done
cardiac catheter mounted (/: hmh)
and then they found that an artery somehow was nearly closed
or completely closed
/: hmh
it is said to be one
is it
P: one he said
didn't he
W: yes
in the letter from the doctors
which they wrote the other day
there it could be two (/: hmh yes)
but up there
 Research note: Marital reality construction 419
I couldn't get the doctor who treated you
the doctor doctor Michael or so
P: anyway
it was all about one spot
as far as I know
and they cannot just repair it
mend it as one says so nicely
it must be operated on (/: hmh)
anyway
In this introductory story of the interview, the husband admits to his wife's
being responsible for his health, and the wife hints at the possibility of
there having been two letters from different doctors; she thus protects her
husband against the interviewer's intervention and gives him a chance to
finish his story.

Story B: Wife as life-saver of medically misdiagnosed husband

W: Ten years ago he was in the Hospital
my husband was glad
that the doctor told him this
but I was madly cross
she said to him
oh she gave him drugs
prescribed something for him
and said
'you are lucky that my colleague isn't here today
Chief Doctor isn't
he would have kept you here' (/: hmh)
they didn't know
that I am a nurse
that I also work in a hospital
P: they thought the high blood pressure
has to do with my kidneys
they put kidney things contrast fluid
but there was nothing
then they (said) 'ready go' (/: yes yes)
W: yes
he had 220 over 160
1 shouldn't say this
his old doctor let him run around
with such high blood pressure
I mean 220 and 160
or 220 over 180 (/: hmh)
he just sent him back to work
420 Uta Gerhardt
until I called him
and asked him
whether he would do something
I would not want to be a widow in my late thirties
it was incredible
and then he (said he) hadn't noticed it
/: hmh
yes
if it changes so slowly
you don't see it yourself really
W: yes
and after Christmas
when he had another real heart attack
here at home
1 didn't say anything to him
I called the doctor
I said this and this happened
he said 'why didn't he come'
I said 'because maybe you send him to another
and he says its a Tietze syndrome'
and he said 'no no'
and then he examined him right away
otherwise he wouldn't have got so far
next time it really could have been blocked completely
and my anxiety (/: hmh) gets worse and worse
because the people
whom we admitted at the geriatrics ward
were just such incidents (/: hmh)
in the beginning
when my husband had to go up to the hospital
it was difficult not to show my anxiety
and not to frighten him
one should not exaggerate
or yes exaggerate
or shouldn't sweep things under the table
but in the beginning my husband didn't want to do anything
so I had to become rabid sometimes
he neither wanted to go to the hospital
nor
P: Whoever you talked with
'Where'
'University Hospital'
Unital
'don't ever go'
'they cut your leg off
 Research note: Marital reality construction 421
when you have diphtheria'
such things
W: always silly sayings
from other people
/: yes yes
In this story, the wife's control over her husband's body turns out to be a
reaction to his habit of disregarding his severe symptoms, as he had for
years. In fact, she seems to have found herself up against a collusion
between her husband and two physicians who misjudged the severity of his
condition: a female doctor at a hospital and their 'old' family physician
proclaimed her husband ready for discharge and fit for work when he was
neither.
The case analysis could stop here. Stories A and B make it clear that the
wife's taking responsibility for her husband's illness and medical care is an
obvious reaction to her husband's inability or unwillingness to do it
himself. The analysis could proceed by classifying the marriage as one of
female dominance under the equilibrium model, or one of the wife's taking
responsibility under the relationship model. The question arises why a man
would risk his life instead of having his severe angina treated - and both
spouses admit to it after an initial attempt to state that the illness only
started recently. If we analyse the interview as discourse taking place
between a couple and a medical sociologist interviewer, we have to ask
ourselves why this couple would present to the interviewer a picture of
themselves in terms of obviously skewed marital interaction regarding
health matters. That is, the rational nature of this account of their
marriage, clad in stories, must be ascertained in this couple's self-
presentation. The answer lies beyond health interaction as a topic in the
interview material, and has to take into account the family's overall
situation of which health-related role structure is only a part. Story C
throws some light on the occupational and financial situation of the family
as a whole.

Story C: Income as the family's threatened 'locus of control'

W: a man several years younger than my husband
there are younger ones and older ones
mostly they are overweight
or even when they are not overweight
they are given a special heart diet
and every diet costs a lot of money
while at the time
they get only sickness benefit
they must spend more
but receive less (/: hmh)
422 Uta Gerhardt
and somehow I don't find this fair from the sick funds (/: hmh)
if someone
as far as I'm concerned
pleaded ill every year
or 'this year I haven't taken my flu'
but if someone really becomes seriously ill (/: hmh)
then he must get angry
because the sick fund pays him
some 100 marks less per month (/: hmh)
we have paid in all the time for decades
and now at least they should give us enough money
so that I can count on i t . . .
P: if you buy a little piece of cheese
one hundred grams cost 89 pfennigs or even cheaper
W: with this ((diet)) one hundred grams cost 2 marks 49 (/: yes yes)
P: that's a joke really . . .
W: I mean I am working too and we have two incomes
we both have to toil quite hard for this
but other people who have only one income
or where there is only one provider
or only one has work . . .
the patient concerned
now has also the additional anger
I would be angry too
if I knew
I have paid the sick fund for 35 years (/: hmh)
and if 1 really
from the sick fund
one hopes that one won't become sick
but if you really do
and then get so much less
P: take only the Otto here
he is a skilled carpenter
has done his army service
has done everything as a citizen
goes to the Labour Exchange
but must go to the main office
is sent from Hinz to Kunz
a few shit firms
where he is paid nothing
and gets 2000 marks
but has not even paid for his flat
and then
'Oh what do you want
we helped you to get money'
 Research note: Marital reality construction 423
'yes but I also need money to live on'
and that also is put on one's shoulders
all the time
with the 500 marks something here
he actually has to pay 500 marks for his rent
including this and that
/: yes if one is married
P: what will they live on then (1 second pause)
they build new Labour Exchange offices
just that the ladies and gentlemen can make coffee
when you come in
it always smells of coffee
with these guys there
W: possibly they need it against the smell of the new workplace
P: this is the worst
the thing is ready
and they have moved in
then they stayed home
because they got headaches from the smell
now they have been assured by statisticians
and by thing
it was in the newspaper today
W: that it will be opened
P: that it will be opened
that smells can be tolerated
and they now have to work again
the ladies and gentlemen there
/: ((laughing)) there are once and again these red-tape jokes
(4 seconds pause) ((complete change of topic))

The five-minute narrative contains an argument clad in several stories (eg,

the story of the Labour Exchange employees comprises orientation,
complication, evaluation, and resolution). Biographically most relevant
are the story of the patient's diet and the one of son Otto's unsuccessful job
search and financial crisis. These stories are part of a narrative which at
first conveys a tale of failure and futility. But more careful reading reveals
that husband and wife manage to impress the interviewer with an account
of how they are honest people pitched against the sick fund bureaucracy
and an uncaring welfare state. They justify their anger against these
institutions by insisting that while they always acted as good citizens they
are now left in the lurch when they deserve help. This anger helps to
underscore their claim that they are a normal respectable family in the eyes
of the interviewer. In fact, he appears to understand the meaning of their
narrative. What is conveyed to him is the implicit message that there is
nothing wrong with this family where the only woman is working full-time
424 Uta Gerhardt
while three adult men are not working and a fourth is a soldier. The
interviewer acknowledges the claim to respectability made by both spouses
creating a joint impression. He abruptly changes the topic to ask about the
wife's employment. The verbatim text of story C continues in the transcript
as follows:
I: ((laughing)) there are once and again these red-tape jokes
(4 seconds pause)
how long would you go on working
if everything
so how many years
W: oh God
I work not a day longer
than 1 have to
no question
but some twelve years
I would still want to

The reality of marriage

If the three excerpts are used to epitomise the wife's role(s) in the
marriage, each story reconstructs a different marital reality. This allows
each of the stories to provide evidence of a particular side of the marriage;
at the same time, it facilitates analysis of the data according to either of the
three conceptual models. Accordingly, the three analytical perspectives
could be perceived as equally adequate to the data.
All three have a basis in sociological theory legitimising their claim to
interpretational validity. While the equilibrium model derives from
structural functionalism, the relationship model is based on symbolic
interactionism and conflict theory, while the reality construction model
epitomises ethnomethodology and phenomenology.
But the coding of interview data in terms of both the equilibrium and the
relationship model may be taken as a biased perception of the wife's
role(s) by the researcher. Categorising the wife's role as nurse-like
dominance appears a far from value-neutral interpretation of case data.
Delineating separate but equal spheres of life of the spouses, categorising
the wife's role as that of caring for her husband through monitoring his
health, and the husband's role as caring for his family through maintaining
employment as the provider, suggest a normative balance between the
spouses with equal weight for both. This presupposes a 'modern' type of
marriage as the point of reference, and personal views of the researcher,
judging the adequacy or inadequacy of the spouses' efforts and type of
coping in the light of this idealised reference point, can easily enter into the
categorisation given to the marriage.
 Research note: Marital reality construction 425
Story C, however, might not lend itself to the interpretational bias that
could be entailed in choosing story A or story B as characteristic of the
couple's case. Story C gives a wider view of the situation. It addressed not
only illness management and the division of labour between the spouses
but also problems faced by the wider family, particularly financial
difficulties, and it also focuses on issues of dealing with (that is, of being
dealt with by) welfare agencies such as the Sick Fund and the Labour
Exchange. In this composite reality construction, family rehabilitation and
illness management are integrated into overall marital coping, which aims
at maintaining and securing the extended family's functioning. In the
marital endeavour, the wife's role and the husband's role are variable
contributions toward preserving the family's existence as a living unit. That
is, the wife's role(s) and the husband's role(s) are mutually dependent on
each other as joint accomplishment; as such unitary endeavour they fulfill
the goal of their marriage, that is, (re)presenting a normal family in
everyday life.
The phenomenologically-based reality construction model is best suited
to the task of value-free interpretation of marital interview narratives. The
construction of categories with which the marriage is understood is not left
to the post-interview analysis of the data by the researcher, but is
recognised as already taking place in the interview itself. Therefore,
analytical categories that reflect the interviewer's politics regarding
women's individualisation are not taken as objectively represented in the
interview material while, in fact, they are applied to it a posteriori. The
interview is analysed as discourse between researcher and interviewee(s)
where both sides construct themselves in the eyes of the other as
competent actor in their social world(s). This means that the rationality of
what is going on and that of what is being told may be reconstructed as
accomplishment of social coping in a comprehensive life-course situation.
In it the marriage is the unit of reference understood both by the couple
and the researcher. The narrative interview is the locus of (re)construction
of the couple's social reality, and the wife's role(s) are its integral part.
Medical Sociology Unit
Justus Liebig University Medical School
Federal Republic of Germany

Acknowledgements

A previous version of the argument was presented at a Medical Sociology

Roundtable Session at the 83rd Annual Meeting of the American Sociological
Association, 1988, with K. U. Kirchgassler, under the title The (Sick) Body as
"Locus of Control": Marital Skew and Self-Presentation in Chronic Sickness. A
Case Study'. The present version benefited from constant ongoing exchange of
ideas with J. Thonnessen.
426 Uta Gerhardt
Notes

1 Translation mine.
2 For a detailed discussion of the problem of reciprocity of perspectives in the
context of role conflict, cf Gerhardt (1973).
3 I wish to thank the German Research Council for generous funding under the
project number Ge 313/5-1 for the first phase between 1987 and 1990.1 also wish
to express my thanks to Professor F. W. Hehrlein of Justus Liebig University
Medical School, Department of Cardio-Vascular Surgery, and Professor Martin
Schlepper, of Max Planck Institute for Cardio-Vascular Diseases, Bad Nauheim,
for their support.
4 The translation of the text from German attempts to retain the characteristics of
spoken speech and to avoid the formal qualities of written language while trying
to convey the somewhat 'hard' tone of German narrative.

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