Psychotherapeutic "Birds of a Feather": Social-Class Status and Religio-Cultural Value Homophily in the Mental Health Field

This study examines the relative influence of social-class status and religio-cultural values on homophilic psychotherapeutic relationships between psychiatrists and clinical psychologists and their private patients. Questionnaire survey data on professional therapists in the Los Angeles, New York, and Chicago metropolitan communities are used to re-assess the underlying bases of the "homophilic hypothesis" that Kandel (1966) and recently Rowden et al. (1970) applied to professional-patient relations in psychotherapy. The central finding of the study is that homophilic psychotherapeutic relationships between both types of professionals and their private patients reflect value homophily involving therapists' religious biographies, based primarily on their family religious origins, and the current religio-cultural affinities of their private patients far more than status homophily based on therapists' social-class origins and either current educational level or family income of patients. The data suggest that social-class status homophily is most directly related to the verbal, intellectual, cognitive dimension of homophilic psychotherapeutic relationships whereas religio-cultural value homophily is a direct reflection of the emotional, affective dimension of psychotherapeutic relations. These findings suggest that the influence of congruent religio-cultural values on mutual professional-patient selection processes stems from an underlying "emotional homophily" in which religious groupings are used as convenient clues to affective characteristics and "feeling states."