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Debt Concordance and Relationship Quality: A Couple-Level Analysis
Author(s) -
Fenaba R. Addo,
Xing Zhang
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
journal of family and economic issues
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.711
H-Index - 46
eISSN - 1573-3475
pISSN - 1058-0476
DOI - 10.1007/s10834-020-09687-8
Subject(s) - concordance , debt , sample (material) , quality (philosophy) , household debt , marital status , pooling , economics , actuarial science , demographic economics , business , finance , demography , medicine , sociology , philosophy , epistemology , population , chemistry , chromatography , artificial intelligence , computer science
Despite a large literature on household finances and relationship quality, little is known about the degree of couple-level agreement on finances and its association with relationship outcomes. This study examines the relationship between financial concordance on household-level consumer debt and relationship quality, and the strength of the association after accounting for couple-level financial management practices. We apply hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) to couple-level data from a sample of married and cohabiting couples with children (435 couples, 870 respondents) from the Marital and Relationship Survey (MARS) and find that concordance on total household credit card debt is common but not the norm, with 55% of couples agreeing on their outstanding debt amount within our sample. Debt concordant couples have greater relationship satisfaction even after accounting for the outstanding debt amount, financial management practices such as income pooling, and joint purchase decisions, as well as relationship characteristics like their marital status, relationship duration, and the number of children in the household. We also find that disagreements related to financial issues attenuate the debt concordance and relationship quality association. Our results highlight the importance of including objective measures of household finance when assessing relationship quality.

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