The objective of this research is to delineate processes of family transition in newly married couples that contribute to marital harmony and stability over a four-year period. Both of these marital factors are strongly related to individual psychological well-being. Selected randomly from marriage records, young couples (200 black couples, 150 white couples) in first marriages will be interviewed soon after marriage both individually and as a couple. Structured and unstructured questions will be asked and in the couple interview a narrative technique--in which the couple is asked to tell the story of their relationship in their own words--will also be used. The interviews will ask for couples' feelings about their marriage and will focus on their own structuring of norms, goals, and gratifications in their life together. The main substantive issues will be: integrating work and family, negotiating family and friendship networks, using discretionary time. These issues will be examined as topics that implicate dialectical motivational concerns about individuation and interdependence. The couple's style of collaborating on the narrative and their handling of revealed differences will provide certain key indices of couple interaction. The entire set of interviews (individual and couple) will be repeated in year three. In years 2 and 4 there will be brief telephone interviews to check on the well-being, stability, and fertility of the marriages. Data analysis will address the following research aims: to clarify and contrast patterns of marital adaptation among black and white urban couples; to find how various styles of marital adaptation are related to marital harmony and stability. Such analyses will identify the processes during the first years of marriage that mediate successful transition in early family formation. The design of the study also permits an assessment of whether study participants, by exploring issues about marital adaptation in the interview process, develop more harmonious and stable marriages than do control couples.
| Oggins, J; Veroff, J; Leber, D (1993) Perceptions of marital interaction among black and white newlyweds. J Pers Soc Psychol 65:494-511 |
