Heydy Whitt
The Legacy of Parents’ Marital Discord: Consequences for Children’s Marital Quality
· National longitudinal study of 297 parents: found that parents’ marital discord was negatively related to offsprings’ marital harmony and positively related to offsprings’ marital discord.
o Parental behaviors most likely to predict problematic marriages among offspring included jealousy, being domineering, getting angry easily, being critical, being moody, and not talking to the spouse.
· Intergenerational Transmission Hypothesis: There is an assumption that some of the characteristics that individuals bring to marriage can be traced to the family of origin has led to a belief that marital discord and satisfaction are transmitted across generations.
o Parental divorce/marital discord = offspring divorce/marital discord.
· Prior research suggests that marital quality is transmitted across generations; however most of the evidence for this is indirect.
· Theory:
o Mediation model assumes that parents’ marital quality affects offsprings’ marriages through several intervening processes which include: observational learning, parent-child relationships, offspring’s negative affect, offspring’s life-course transitions, socioeconomic status and parental divorce.
o Spurious association shows not causal relationship between parents’ and offsprings’ marital quality. It assumes that with all relevant parental characteristics controlled, there are no significant paths linking parents’ and offsprings’ marital quality.
· Goals/Hypotheses:
o Parents’ marital quality predicts offsprings’ marital quality
o Associations spurious by controlling characteristics
o Mechanisms responsible for intergenerational transmission; for each mediating variable 3 hypotheses were tested:
§ Parents’ marital quality is associated with the mediator
§ Mediator associated with offsprings’ marital quality
§ Controlling mediator causes the association between parents’ and offsprings’ marital quality to weaken and become nonsignificant.
o Determine the specific aspects of the parents’ marriage that are most consequential for offsprings’ marriages.
o Determine whether shifts in parents’ marital quality predict offspring’s marital outcomes.
· Discussion:
o Analysis revealed that parents’ marital discord was significantly linked with offspring’s marital harmony and marital discord
o No association between parents’ and offsprings’ marital discord, no parental control variables were significant predictors in their own right; not spurious.
o Observational-learning perspective assumes that children are exposed to parents’ behavior, process and store this information, and replicate this behavior in their own marriages.
o Parents’ marital dissolution does not play a mediating role. Offspring’s life-course transitions do not seem to mediate the influence of the parent’s marriage. Parent-child relationships play a role in the transmission of marital quality.
o Parental marriage discord affects offsprings’ marriages.
o Findings indicate offspring’s later marriages benefit when a discordant parental marriage becomes more harmonious and that offspring’s later marriages suffer when a harmonious parental marriage becomes more discordant.
· Limitations:
o Offspring not married by 1997 were excluded from the analysis; sample was disproportionately represents early marrying offspring.
o Relied on retrospective data to measure relations with parents during adolescence.
o Study was based entirely on self-report data.
o Data was collected from only one parent and one offspring
· Strengths:
o Parents provided data on independent variables (parents’ marital quality) and offspring provided data on dependent variables (offspring’s’ marital quality); data were in correct causal order, and problems with common-method variance were minimal.
· Contributions:
o Study provides the strongest evidence yet that marital quality is transmitted from parents to children, even when controlling parental characteristics that might affect offspring’s marriages.
o Study suggests that it is primarily the negative aspects of parental behavior that are consequential for children.
o Indicates that offspring’s marriages respond not only to the level of discord in parents’ marriages at a single point in time, but also to shifts in parental discord.
o Rules out a number of potential explanations for this phenomenon, thus narrowing the number of variables requiring further exploration.
· Questions:
o Does marital longevity work the same way? Why or why not?
o Could there be other factors not mentioned in the study that may affect the transmission of marital discord between generations?