Communicator Virtue and its Relation to Marriage Quality

Abstract

A study was conducted based on the theoretical work of Stamp (1999) and Jeffries (2000) that assumes communicator characteristics predict communicator behavior and subsequent relationship quality. A review of the marital communication literature yielded 5 personal-relational virtues that tend toward the development of stable, healthy marriages. A scale was developed to measure participants' impressions of these qualities, namely self-control, wisdom, faithfulness, industry, and humility in both self and spouse. Seventy couples completed this Self-Report of Marital Virtues Scale, Norton's (1983) Quality of Marriage Index, and Fitzpatrick's (1988) Relational Dimensions Instrument. Results indicated that (a) partners tend to hold consensual views of each other's virtue, (b) partners tend to view their marriage as one of high quality if they view their spouse as virtuous, and (c) wives deem their marriages better the more their husbands hold private assessments of personal virtue; the same was not found for husbands. In addition, only husbands' self-perceptions of faithfulness correlated with wives' reporting of husbands' emotional sharing. The results are discussed in terms of gender differences, virtue as a communicator characteristic, and models of interpersonal communication.