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Dyadic Processes in Early Marriage: Attributions, Behavior, and Marital Quality
Author(s) -
Durtschi Jared A.,
Fincham Frank D.,
Cui Ming,
Lorenz Frederick O.,
Conger Rand D.
Publication year - 2011
Publication title -
family relations
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.772
H-Index - 87
eISSN - 1741-3729
pISSN - 0197-6664
DOI - 10.1111/j.1741-3729.2011.00655.x
Subject(s) - attribution , psychology , quality (philosophy) , social psychology , psychological intervention , developmental psychology , association (psychology) , psychotherapist , philosophy , epistemology , psychiatry
Marital processes in early marriage are important for understanding couples' future marital quality. Spouses' attributions about a partner's behavior have been linked to marital quality, yet the mechanisms underlying this association remain largely unknown. When we used couple data from the Family Transitions Project ( N = 280 couples) across the first 4 years of marriage, results from actor‐partner interdependence modeling demonstrated that early marriage responsibility attributions were associated with marital quality 4 years later after controlling for initial marital quality. Further, couples' warm and hostile behavior 2 years into the marriage mediated the attribution‐marital quality association. The results suggest that interventions designed to facilitate change in romantic relationships may benefit from addressing attributions for the partner's behavior, in addition to changing behaviors, as part of a dyadic process unfolding across time.