This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).
The goal of this project is to extend current models of marital development by examining the links between external stress and relationship behaviors through the assessment of marital quality, and relationship skills of couples over the early years of marriage. Specifically, the project aims to offer a new perspective on prior research arguing that possessing good relationship skills may protect a marriage from the detrimental effects of associated with various stressors. Rather than buffering the marriage, relationship skills may deteriorate and thus actually represent the mechanism through which certain factors impact marital quality. The project will assess the resources couples have for addressing problems that arise, in order to identify factors that may promote resilience in marital quality. The investigator will collect data from a sample of 150 first time married, newlywed couples at five time points over the first three years of their marriage. Eligible couples will be scheduled for a laboratory session and mailed an initial packet containing self-report measures to complete at home, as well as envelopes for each spouse. Couples will be instructed to complete their questionnaires without consulting one another, seal their forms in the individual envelopes, and bring their envelopes to the lab session. During the lab session, each couple will engage in videotaped problem-solving discussions to assess conflict behaviors. After the session, couples will be asked to complete a one-page diary questionnaire each evening for seven nights. A wide variety of measures of marital outcomes, adaptive processes, external stressors, coping resources, and marital experiences will be included. Thus, spouses' pro-relationship behaviors will be assessed in multiple ways.
This project aims to shed light on the life events that may inhibit successful relationship functioning. Understanding the dynamics and contexts that account for successful marital outcomes should, in turn, have a broader impact on society by helping to inform practices that help the marital unit, and direct resources toward practices most likely to be effective in strengthening families.
