Marital Satisfaction, Assessment Of

Terminology

For as long as marital satisfaction has been assessed, there has also been considerable confusion and controversy regarding the differences among the terms marital satisfaction, marital adjustment, and marital quality. Marital satisfaction refers to global marital sentiment or marital happiness as a unitary construct. Marital adjustment is broader in scope, and includes a consideration of marital processes such as conflict management skills and marital outcomes such as marital satisfaction. Marital quality refers to marital processes alone, such as the quality of a couple's conflict management skills, supportive transactions, sexual relations, or emotional intimacy. Additionally, several terms have been used to describe low marital satisfaction or adjustment, including marital discord, marital dissatisfaction, marital distress, and marital dysfunction. Low marital satisfaction is also distinguished from marital dissolution, which refers to separation or divorce.

Ways of Assessing Marital Satisfaction and Related Constructs

Historically, marital satisfaction and adjustment have been assessed by administering questionnaires to husbands and wives and then calculating sum scores for spouses (or couples) based on their responses. Scores are typically placed on a continuum from low to high satisfaction. Starting in the 1950s, marital adjustment was assessed with omnibus measures in which spouses evaluated multiple aspects of their marriage, such as the amount of disagreement across different areas of conflict, global evaluations of the marriage, and frequency of sexual relations. Harvey Locke and Karl Wallace's Marital Adjustment Test (MAT) and Graham Spanier's Dyadic Adjustment Scale (DAS) are two widely used measures of marital adjustment.

In the 1980s, researchers and clinicians also began assessing marital satisfaction with shorter, unidimensional measures of global sentiment toward one's marriage. Robert Norton's Quality of Marriage Index (QMI) and Walter Schumm and colleagues' Kansas Marital Satisfaction Scale (KMSS) are widely used measures of global marital satisfaction. Researchers and clinicians also began to assess marital satisfaction using a semantic differential approach, a way of quantifying spouses' evaluations of their marriage by having them rate their perceptions on scales between two opposite [Page 1029]adjectives (e.g., satisfied to dissatisfied, good to bad). Charles Osgood and colleagues, and Ted Huston and Anita Vangelisti, have developed and validated versions of semantic differential measures to assess marital satisfaction.

Since the mid-1990s, there has been a move toward assessing marital satisfaction and adjustment with multidimensional approaches. For example, Frank Fincham and Kenneth Linfield developed the Positive and Negative Quality in Marriage Scale (PANQIMS), on which spouses evaluate the positive and negative qualities of their partner and marriage, yielding scores for two distinct aspects of marital satisfaction. Global measures collapse these two domains, making it impossible to determine whether it is lack of positive or high levels of negative evaluation that reduces marital happiness. Alternatively, the PANQIMS allows spouses to be categorized as happy (high positive and low negative marital quality), distressed (low positive and high negative), ambivalent (high on both positive and negative marital quality), or indifferent (low on both positive and negative marital quality). Douglas Snyder's Marital Satisfaction Inventory (MSI) is a multidimensional measure of marital adjustment that differentiates among levels and sources of distress. Dimensions include assessments of family of origin conflict, sexual satisfaction, and problem-solving communication strategies.

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