The study was designed to investigate the theory that individuals who believe their environment to be compatible with their own self-concept will be happy and satisfied in that environment. Individuals who view their environment to be inconsistent with their self-concept will be dissatisfied and wish to leave that environment. A sample of Roman Catholic priests rated the concepts, self, ideal-self and the Church on an adapted semantic differential scale. Difference scores were cal-culated for each subject for three concept pairs: self-ideal-self, self-church, and ideal-self-church. In addition the subjects responded to three measures of adjustment; a sentence completion form, a standardized self-actualization scale, and a specially designed question-naire, they also answered a series of questions measuring their opinion of the church and their satisfaction with the priesthood.
The subjects were subdivided into four developmental categories: developed, developing, underdeveloped and maldeveloped, on the basis of a clinical interview conducted by trained psychologists they were again divided into three groups according to large, small, or moderate self-ide•l-self difference scores. Pearson product-moment correlations were calculated between self-ideal-self differences and the three measures of adjustment and between the self-church and ideal-self-church differences and the measures of satisfaction with the Church and priesthood.
When all the subjects were taken as a group only the sentence completion form as a measure of adjustment was substantially correlated with self-ideal-self differences. However, when the subjects were divided into the four developmental groups, the indicator of self-actualization was substantially correlated with self-ideal-self differences for the developing and maldeveloped subjects.
When the subjects were divided into groups according to the degree of self-ideal difference, the subjects in the moderate difference group showed the strongest correlation with the measure of self-actualization. This supported pre-vious findings which suggested that both low and high self-ideal differences correlate less well with measures of adjustment than do the moderate self-ideal differences. When all of the subjects were taken together the self-church and ideal-self-church differences did not correlate well with any of the indicators of satisfaction with the priesthood. However, it was shown that developed priests who saw a similarity between themselves and the Church saw the church to be a more traditional institution, while maldeveloped subjects seeing a similarity between the self and the Church wanted the Church to be a more person-oriented agent for social reform
