FAMILY DYNAMICS AND ATTITUDES TOWARD MARRIAGE

To examine our hypothesis that family experiences would be associated with attitudes toward marriage, we administered the Family Environment Scale (FES; Moos & Moos, 1986) and a Marriage Attitudes Questionnaire (MAQ: adapted from Long. 1987) to 40 unmarried college students. Corr elational analyses indicated that for the conflict subscale of the FES , only two of the six marital expectation questions approached signifi cance. However, family expressiveness (another subscale of the FES) wa s significantly correlated with three of the marital expectation quest ions and approached significance with a fourth question. These results indicated that higher expressiveness in the family was significantly related to positive attitudes toward marriage. We concluded that famil y dynamics need to be studied from multiple perspectives to identify f actors that influence marital expectations.