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Date: Thu, 20 Mar 1997 17:36:23 +0100
To: socgrad@csf.colorado.edu
From: czerlinski@mpipf-muenchen.mpg.de (Jean Czerlinski)
Subject: Re: Help on Social Change

> I think there is a
> negative relationship between the number of years spent in formal
> education after hight school and the experience of tension in the
> life of the married couple.

Not just "how much" tension there is matters (this might simply have
to do with how much the couple agrees) but also how the tension there
is is handled.  High tension + good resolution strategies could easily
make for a happier and more stable marriage than low tension but poor
resolution strategies.  Why?  Because the first time the low-tension
couple encounters a situation in which they disagree, they don't know
what to do!

A cross-cultural (U.S, U.K., British Pakistani, and Turkish) study
by Carol C. Weisfeld and Glenn Weisfeld offers a way of measuring
how tension is resolved, in addition to a way of measuring marital
"satisfaction" and other things.  They created tension by offering
a "reward" for participating in the experiment, but the reward was
something that either the husband liked or something the wife liked.
In their case, the reward was a video.  Each person indicated earlier
which video they'd most like, e.g. the husband might pick a video
of "Rambo" while the wife might pick "Romeo and Juliet" (just to
go along with stereotypes here).  At the end the couple would
have to decide together which ONE video they would take as their
reward, and their conversation in reaching this decision was recorded.
Weisfeld & Weisfeld had a method of analyzing this decision-making process.
Of course, all this may be far more complex than you can deal with
as a class project, but it's something to keep in mind.

I saw a presentation of the study, "Some Correlates of Marital Satisfaction"
at a conference, but you can surely find published articles by looking
up the authors' names.

>From the conference abstract:
"Marital satisfaction was related to viewing the spouse as a good parent.
Where free choice is reduced, marriages are less happy: where the bride was
pregnant and, in our Turkish sample, in arranged marriages.  The pair bond
is threatened more by female infidelity than male [comment: but I've seen
studies that show wives get more upset if their husband has a close
*emotional* relationship with another women, regardless of sex was involved
or not]; en in the four cultures studied expected the wife to tolerate
infidelity more than women expected the husband to.  Also, men felt more
possessive than wives (US data only).  In all four cultures, husbands made
more of the important decisions, and (UK and US data only) this arrangement
enhanced the wife's satisfaction even more than the husband's.  His higher
income (US only) and her greater attractiveness (US, UK) were also positive
factors.  Other correlates of marital success discussed include fecundity,
homogamy, dominant nonverbal behavior by husband, sexual satisfaction, and
wife's economic dependence on husband."

Best of luck in your study,

Jean