Marital Typologies

Marital typologies represent attempts of scholars to simplify the study of marriage by grouping together, and essentially treating as equivalent, those marriages that are similar and to distinguish, and treat separately, those that are different. This entry reviews basic assumptions underlying different marital typologies and their roles in theorizing about interaction processes and outcomes relevant to marriage.

Marital typologies, like other typologies of human relationships, provide a cognitive framework that primarily serves two functions: to organize observations and to systematically relate knowledge to explain and predict behaviors and outcomes. As such, they are the inventions of observers (scholars and laypersons alike) rather than the reflection of an actual or natural state of the marital relationship. Although often related, these two functions are theoretically orthogonal. Typologies that do a good job of fulfilling the first function (i.e., organizing observations) often make intuitive sense and are based on some easily recognizable attribute of the marriage that makes identification of the type easy. However, because marital outcomes usually are dependent on processes and dynamics that are not linked to easily observed attributes, typologies based on such attributes are not necessarily good at explaining and predicting behaviors and outcomes.

Typologies that are good at fulfilling the second function (i.e., explaining and predicting behaviors and outcomes) are frequently based on what scholars and researchers have learned to be relevant and important for the internal processes and dynamics of marriages that lead to different behaviors and outcomes rather than some easily recognizable attribute. Consequently, it is not easily apparent what type a marriage falls into and, therefore, it is not uncommon to find that typologies of marriages are more meaningful to researchers than to laypersons or even the married couples themselves. Most scholars favor typologies that fulfill the function of explaining and predicting.