Using typologies outlined by Gottman and Fitzpatrick as well as institutional and companionate models of marriage, the authors conducted a latent class analysis of marital conflict trajectories using 20 years of data from the Marital Instability Over the Life Course study. Respondents were in one of three groups: high, medium (around the mean), or…

Response to the death of a spouse was examined by focusing on acceptance, which was conceptualized as both a process and an outcome. Grounded theory was applied to analyze the experience of 15 bereaved Hong Kong Chinese older adults. The main theme that emerged was time. Acceptance of spousal death was found to be related to the search for meaning…

Although there are frequent calls for the study of effects of children on families and mutual influence processes within families, little empirical progress has been made. We address these questions at the level of microprocesses during marital conflict, including children's influence on marital conflict and parents' influence on each other.…

Prior research indicates that the married enjoy higher levels of well-being than the unmarried, including unmarried cohabiters. Yet, comparisons of married and unmarried persons routinely exclude partnered gays and lesbians. Using a large probability sample, this study assessed how the well-being of partnered gays and lesbians (282) compares with…

Objectives: The objectives are to explore the experience of living with a person who has undergone a process of diagnosis in his or her adult years and to examine, from the partner's perspective, how diagnosis and treatment with medication affects the ADHD patients' understanding of themselves, their behavior, and their relationships with others.…

The distinctive economic histories of African American and White wives suggest that involvement in household income production holds contextually situated unique meanings for these groups. Yet research has not addressed racial differences in the effects of relative earnings on marital well-being. Surveying 431 employed wives in 21 U.S. cities, we…

The purpose of the study was to shed light on the potentially differing dynamics of violence against separated and divorced women by their ex-husbands and violence against married women by their current husbands. Using a nationally representative sample of 7,369 heterosexual women from Cycle 13 of Statistics Canada's General Social Survey,…

The authors investigate the direction of the relationship between marital happiness and wives' full-time employment using the 1987 to 1988 and 1992 to 1994 waves of the National Survey of Families and Households. First, the authors predict change in wives' employment between the two waves using marital happiness and other Time 1 characteristics.…

The Couples Emotion Rating Form assesses 3 types of negative emotion that are salient during times of relationship conflict. Hard emotion includes feeling angry and aggravated, soft emotion includes feeling hurt and sad, and flat emotion includes feeling bored and indifferent. In Study 1, scales measuring hard and soft emotion were validated by…

This study investigated the link between daily health symptoms and spousal emotional well-being in a sample of 96 older dyads. Higher negative mood and lower positive mood were associated with spousal symptoms in couples wherein husbands or wives reported higher average levels of symptoms. For wives, partner effects were moderated by husbands'…

This study examines the factors contributing to middle-aged widows' adaptation to their husbands' death due to physical illness, 1 to 5 years after the initial loss. Ninety-three widows and 93 married women, who served as controls, filled out questionnaires assessing their experience of stress and strain, their Sense of Coherence level, the social…

This study investigated psychosocial factors thought to be associated with perceived stress over the course of infertility treatment. The research was based on secondary analysis of data from the Study of Marriage, Family, and Life Quality with a sample of 128 people who completed an infertility-related stress instrument at all three measurement…