Marital interaction and satisfaction: A longitudinal view.

Abstract

Two longitudinal studies of marital interaction were conducted using observational coding of couples attempting to resolve a high-conflict issue.We found that a different pattern of results predicts concurrent marital satisfaction than predicts change in marital satisfaction over 3 years.Results suggest that some marital interaction patterns, such as disagreement and anger exchanges, which have usually been considered harmful to a marriage, may not be harmful in the long run.These patterns were found to relate to unhappiness and negative interaction at home concurrently, but they were predictive of improvement in marital satisfaction longitudinally.However; three interaction patterns were identified as dysfunctional in terms of longitudinal deterioration: defensiveness (which includes whining), stubborness, and withdrawal from interaction.Hypotheses about gender differences in roles for the maintenance of marital satisfaction are presented.Perhaps the oldest question in the research literature on marriage is, What distinguishes a happy marriage from one that is unhappy (Terman, Buttenweiser, Ferguson, Johnson, & Wilson, 1938)?To this we add the related longitudinal question, What distinguishes a marriage that will become more satisfying over time from one that will become less satisfying over time?At first glance, it might seem that the same set of features will provide the answer to both the contemporary and the longitudinal questions, but the possibility of different answers becomes quite strong on further consideration: For example, behaviors that are functional for "keeping the peace" in the present may leave unresolved critical areas of conflict that might undermine the relationship over time.We examined these questions by using the microanalytic observation of behavior.Although research on marriage has been conducted since the 1930s, most of the early work relied exclusively on self-report and interview methods.The legacy of this early work was a number of good self-report measures of marital satisfaction with excellent psychometric properties of construct validity and discriminant validity as well as moderate levels of predictive validity (see Burgess, Locke, & Thomes, 1971).Systematic observational research on marital interaction began in the 1970s (Weiss, Hops, & Patterson, 1973), and in the following years, various observational coding systems have appeared in the literature (for a review see Filsinger, 1983).This work has contributed to the development of a model of marital distress that focuses on communication-skills deficits in conflict resolution.We used a convergence of two major systems, the Marital Interaction Coding System (MICS; Weiss & Summers, 1983) and the Couples Interaction Scoring System (CISS; Gottman,

Keywords

Affiliated Institutions

• University of Washington US
• Seattle University US

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