Kurt L. Olsson and Dr. James M. Harper, Family Life

The main objective of this research was to determine if there is a relationship between the level of satisfaction in a marriage and the accuracy with which the individuals could predict their spouses= perceptions. Attributional styles, or patterns, are those perceptual sets that tell us how to interpret events, especially their causes.1 For example, if a husband attributes the cause of a car accident to poor road conditions instead of feeling that his wife was driving recklessly, he has made an external attribution, assigning the cause to an external influence rather than an internal one. Many comparisons have been made between relationship satisfaction and various attributional styles or combinations of styles.2 Until this study, there were none that had compared the attributional styles of individuals to their spouses= perceptions of that style. In other words, we didn’t know if the wife in the previous example knew the husband was attributing the cause of the accident to poor road conditions, or if she misunderstood his attribution and perceived it as internal and felt blamed. The hypothesis was that those individuals who better understand the way their spouses attribute causality and responsibility will have more satisfied spouses.

Method

To qualify for the study, both spouses were required to complete the questionnaire. 100 questionnaire packets were delivered to potential participants, 49 were returned of which 45 were complete. Of the reporting husbands, 41.9% were between 18 and 25 years old, 32.6% were 26 to 33, 9.4% were 34 to 49, and the remaining 16.3% were over 50 years old. Of the wives, 60% were 18 to 25, 17.8% were 26-33, 8.8% were 34 to 49, and the remaining 13.3% were over 50 years old. Three husbands and four wives reported the current marriage as their second. Of the 45 couples, 51% had been married for less than three years, 22% were between three and seven years, and the remaining 27% had been together for over seven years. The mean number of children was 1.8 with only six of the respondents reporting more than four children. Just over 50 percent reported having been friends before marriage for less than one year, another 30 percent were between one and forty percent, while the remaining twenty percent had been friends for five years or longer before marrying.

In this study, participants were asked to complete a series of surveys. The first measured their own attributional style. 3 The second was a modified version of the first to measure what they thought their spouse’s attributional style is. The third measured their marital satisfaction.4 The modified instrument (measuring what the individual thought about his or her spouse’s attributional style) was compared to the spouse=s actual attributional style to determine how accurate the individual’s perceptions were. The resulting difference, labeled a Perceptual Discrepancy Score, was then compared to the marital satisfaction of the perceived spouse to determine if the relationship hypothesized was present.

Results

The hypothesis was found to be false. Spouses of more accurate individuals were not significantly more
satisfied with their marriages than those of less accurate individuals. However, further analysis revealed an unexpected relationship. In those marriages where the husband thought his wife was attributing harmful intent to him more than she really was, the marital satisfaction was significantly lower. Or, it could be said that if the husband felt like the wife thought he intended to hurt her (when she really didn’t), the marital satisfaction was lower.

Discussion

A possible source of the discrepancy could be that when husbands feel blame they also feel they have been attributed intent. Women may come to the attribution of blame through a different series/sequence of attributions than men. It has been assumed by researchers that blame can only be arrived at after the prerequisite intent has been attributed. The wives in this study did not seem to require attributing harmful intent to their husbands in order to attribute blame. Husbands seemed to follow the assumed path more consistently. Then, if a husband has to feel someone intended to harm him in order to place blame, then it would be logical for him to assume that if his wife attributes blame to him, then she has also already attributed intent to his action. This seems to be the explanation most consistent with previous research.5

The relationship between this misunderstanding and dissatisfaction remains unclear. It was initially assumed that the husband is wrong in his estimation of his wife’s attributions because of the validated instrument that was used to measure her attributions. However, there still is room for argument that the wives may be repressing, or be unwilling to report, their true attributions of intent. Therefore, in the marriage, there may be underlying defensiveness of which the husbands are recognizing (even subconsciously) the attributional source.

Does this discrepancy speak of trust in the relationship? Is the husband second guessing what the wife says? Or is this just showing up here because there is an element of blame. Is this just a mirror image of the relationship between attributed blame and dissatisfaction? The ever present alternative explanation of the finding is a third variable, perhaps poor communication, that is causing both the dissatisfaction and the discrepancies. Another curiosity was that it is only the husband’s PDS of attributed intent that the correlation with satisfaction appears, instead of the effect being gender universal. Part of this is the fact that the wives’ were more accurate in their perceptions of their husbands’ attributed intent. Are women better at interpreting intent, or are men better at communicating it? More research is clearly warranted.

My Experience

One of the biggest challenges was trying to get the computer program to import the data entered in another program. The IRB review took longer than I thought it would, too. If I had it to over, I would start that process as soon as I got approval for the project. I had a low response rate. I would use follow up reminders to help improve that. I would also allow much more time for data analysis. For example, the regressions calculated did not control for the participants’ actual attribution scores, which would help clarify the true nature and degree of the correlations.

References

• Bradbury, T. N., & Fincham, F. D. (1992). Assessing attributions in marriage: The relationship attribution measure. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 62, 457-468.
• Weary, G., Edwards, J. A., & Riley, S. (1994). Attribution. In Ramachandran, V. S. (Ed.), Encyclopedia of human behavior (pp. 291-299). San Diego, CA: Academic Press.
• Bradbury, T. N., & Fincham, F. D. (1992). Assessing attributions in marriage: The relationship attribution measure. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 62, 457-468.
• Spanier, G. B. (1976). Measuring dyadic adjustment: New scales for assessing the quality of marriage and similar dyads. Journal of Marriage and the Family, 38, 15-28.
• Quigley, B. M., & Tedeschi, J. T. (1996). Mediating effects of blame attributions on feelings of anger. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 22, 1280-1288.