Black health professional families: assessment of strengths and stability.

Despite pernicious racism, most black health professionals achieve professional success and most have stable marriages. A 19-item questionnaire was designed to assess this hypothesis following a lecture on the strengths and weaknesses of black health professional families to physicians, dentists, and their spouses (n = 38) at the 1990 annual meeting of the combined Old North State Medical and Dental Societies of North Carolina. Surprisingly, these families seemed eager to disclose feelings about themselves, their professions, and their marriages. Major preliminary findings were that these health professionals were more prone to indicate unhappiness than their spouses and less likely to see racism as an impediment to careers, and more willing to acknowledge that they would like to correct something in their lives.