CHARACTERISTICS OF MARITAL QUALITY AND STABILITY AMONG WIVES IN VARIOUS STAGES OF MARRIAGE

Abstract

The main objective of the research presented in this paper was to determine whether or not there are significant differences in marital quality and stability among women in various stages of marriage, and to determine the structure of these differences, if they exist. We have also examined the differences in the characteristics of marriage between the wives in the first stage of marriage, i.e. the marriage period without children, and the wives in the next stage, after the childbirth. Those differences were analyzed separately because numerous studies from other countries suggest that the transition to parenthood changes marital relationships and makes them more difficult. The studies also suggest that the motherhood affects a wife’s life much more to than fatherhood affects the life of the man. The sample included 1580 wives of different socioeconomic status, 19 to 64 years old, living in formal or informal marriage. The quality of the marital relationship was meas­ured by a Dyadic Adjustment Scale – DAS (Spanier, 1989), and marital stability was assessed through the indicators of the potential for the divorce (Booth, Johnson, & Edwards, 1983). Discri­minant function analysis of the different periods of marriage, found only one statistically signifi­cant discriminant function (Rc = 0.26, p = 0.00), which was interpreted as “High attractiveness of the marriage along with reduced barriers to leaving the relationship.” The results are suggesting a downward tendency of the marital quality and marital satisfaction followed by the decrease in the divorce potential across the stages of marriage. In other words, there is a continual tendency of decreases in marital quality and satisfaction, and the increase of the marital stability over the dif­ferent developmental stages of marriage. The greatest differences on isolated dicriminant function are between wives from the first and last of the examined stages of marriage, i.e. marriages in which the children are not yet born and marriages with late adolescent children that are ready to leave their parents. Second discriminant function analysis showed significant discriminative di­mension (Rc = 0.25, p = 0.00), primarily determined by the potential for divorce, and marital satisfaction. Based on the results of this study, we may conclude that the transition to parenthood significantly strengthens marriage, and that the perception of marital quality and satisfaction steadily declines from the beginning to the end of marriage continuum. It is important to empha­size that, despite the existence of statistically significant inter-group differences, there is a large individual variation among wives within the same marital stage, and therefore it is not possible to make a reliable prediction of perceptions of the quality and stability of marital relations based solely on the stage of the marriage.