Ordinal Position and the Behavior of Visiting the Child Guidance Clinic (Report II)

In their study, Ko and Sun (1) found that the children's ordinal position is phenomenologically closely related to their probability of visiting the psychiatrists. For interpretation of this finding, these authors proposed two hypotheses, one of which states that the children occupying a certain ordinal position are much more prone to emotional difficulties than those in other ordinal positions. The other hypothesis, the parent attitude hypothesis, postulates that children of a certain ordinal position are more likely to be brought by their parents to see a psychiatrist when mentally or physically ill. Supposing that the parent attitude hypothesis is true, then it can be predicted that the case number distribution over birth order categories of the mentally ill group will be exactly the same as that of the physically ill group. Because if the parents' different attitude toward different birth order is the most important influential factor, then this factor will also influence with the same degree of intensity as the parents of the physically ill children to bring them to see the physicians. The main purpose of this paper is to test this prediction.