Mother-daughter identification: Polish and Polish-American mothers and their adult daughters.

Toward the goal of furthering our understanding of the mother-daughter relationship, we investigated one aspect of the mother-daughter relationship, the mutual identification that occurs within it. Mutual identification was defined as the process by which a mother and her daughter internalize characteristics of each other. A convenience sample of 81 Polish and 81 Polish-American mother-daughter dyads was studied. Mother-daughter identification was measured using a semantic differential (SD) scale that included 12 concepts. Analyses using paired t tests revealed that there was no significant difference between the ratings of the Polish-American mothers and those of their daughters on 7 of the 12 concepts and no significant difference between the ratings of the Polish mothers and those of their daughters on 10 of the 12. There were, however, statistically significant differences between the Polish and Polish-American women's ratings of the concepts. These data are interpreted as support for the theory of mother-daughter identification.