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A three wave study on the reciprocal relationship between marital interaction and marital happiness
Abstract
This research examines the reciprocal relationship between marital happiness and marital interaction with a three-wave panel study of a national sample of married persons. Homans' (1950, 1974) theory of dyadic relationships expects that the more two persons interact with one another, the greater their affection for one another. Greater liking, in turn, is also expected to increase interaction. A positive reciprocal relationship should result from this process. White (1983), in a cross-sectional study of the first wave of the same sample, detected statistically significant positive instantaneous reciprocal effects between marital happiness and marital interaction. Because she used cross-sectional data, restrictive assumptions were required to estimate the reciprocal effects with the two-stage least squares. This relationship is reexamined here using three-wave panel data and multiple indicators methods estimated with LISREL. The analysis was carried out in four stages. First, a confirmatory factor analysis established the relationship between the empirical indicators and the latent variables. Next, structural equation models were used to estimate the magnitude of the reciprocal effects and the overall fit of the models. Multiple group analyses were then used to test for different effects for men and women and by marital duration. In the final stage, White's cross-sectional analysis (1983) was reestimated to test for sample attrition effects and the effects of using maximum likelihood instead of two-stage least squares methods. The present study found a reciprocal relationship between marital interaction and happiness similar to that found in White's study (1983) in several alternative models, although this relationship was less evident in the second wave. Therefore, the results support Homans' proposition (1950, 1974) that interaction and affection reciprocally affect each other. The findings also confirm White's argument that marital happiness plays an important role in determining marital interaction. However, the empirical results do not support White's conclusion that marital happiness produces a stronger impact on marital interaction. The evidence that marital interaction has produced a greater impact on marital happiness in the third wave may suggest an interaction effect between marital-interaction-and happiness relationship and marital duration.
Subject Area
Families & family life|Personal relationships|Sociology
Recommended Citation
Zuo, Jiping, "A three wave study on the reciprocal relationship between marital interaction and marital happiness" (1991). ETD collection for University of Nebraska-Lincoln. AAI9208122.
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/dissertations/AAI9208122