Dysfunctional symptom intensity in wives of alcoholics as measured by the Emotional Dependency Questionnaire (EDQ)

Introduction
The paper outlines the work on creating the Emotional Dependency Questionnaire, a new research tool designed to measure various characteristics and behaviours resulting from married/partner relation difficulties, particularly in reference to the wives of alcoholics. The project was undertaken due to the numerous conceptual difficulties connected with the so-called co-dependency and diagnostic difficulties in identifying areas of dysfunction of alcoholics’ wives.

Material and methods
Based on the literature review in the self-model, six variables/research scales have been extracted concerning: Need of Control, Lower Self-Esteem, Anxiety, Anger, Denial and Social Isolation. Psychometric verifications showed high Cronbach’s α reliability indicators. In the scope of the construct validity analyses, confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) indicated that the tested model fits data obtained from the examined Polish sample sufficiently.

Results
Comparative studies were carried out on trials N = 157 in the research group of wives of alcoholics and N = 143 in the group of the wives of non-alcoholics. These indicated statistically significant differences in all the researched scales and the group of alcoholics’ wives achieved the highest scores in terms of the Lower Self-Esteem.

Discussion
The results confirm the reports pointing to adaptation problems and dysfunctional behaviours experienced by the wives of alcoholics. Subsequent studies should cover a wider population of alcoholics’ wives, including those who do not participate in therapy.

Conclusions
The Emotional Dependency Questionnaire seems to be a useful tool for both individual and group research; it can also be useful in targeting therapy goals for the wives of alcoholics.