•  
  •  
 

Journal of Undergraduate Research

Keywords

satisfied spouses, marriage, perceptions, attributional style

College

Family, Home, and Social Sciences

Department

Family Life

Abstract

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.

Download

Included in

Sociology Commons

Share

COinS