J. Veroff et al., PREDICTING MARITAL QUALITY WITH NARRATIVE ASSESSMENTS OF MARITAL EXPERIENCE, Journal of marriage and the family, 55(2), 1993, pp. 326-337
From a longitudinal study of the first Years of marriage, aspects of a
joint narrative told by couples about their relationship were related
to an assessment of marital quality. The analyses focused on selected
measures from two coding systems applied to the narrative, one captur
ing the quality of affects mentioned in the narrative and the other id
entifying themes observed in the narrative. Several narrative measures
taken in the first year of marriage were found to predict marital qua
lity in the third year over and above relevant social demographic and
psychological variables derived from standard survey questions. In par
ticular, third-year marital happiness was positively associated with t
he frequency with which couples spontaneously mentioned relational aff
ects in their stories during the first year, and whether they describe
d their courtship as a positively accelerating experience. Other narra
tive themes were also shown to have a relationship to marital quality,
but only for particular subsets of the sample. The general usefulness
of this kind of systematic narrative approach within a reality constr
uction perspective is discussed,