Predicting Marital Adjustment by Comparing a Divorced and a Happily Married Group

Abstract

T HIS PAPER is a preliminary report of a study of adjustment in marriage which has two somewhat unique features:' (i) It is a comparison of marriages ending in divorce with marriages outsiders judged to be the most happily married known to them. (2) The subjects are fairly representative of the general population whereas those of previous marital prediction studies have been predominantly white-collar, middle class and highly educated. The unrepresentative character of the two previous marital prediction studies is indicated by the fact that 52.5 per cent of husbands in the Burgess-Cottrell group engaged in professional, semiprofessional or upper business activities and 56.5 per cent of husbands in the Terman study held professional, business executive, or managerial positions; the income level of the subjects of both studies was relatively high; and 58.2 per cent of Burgess-Cottrell subjects and 73.2 per cent of Terman subjects had one or more years of education beyond high school, with i6.2 per cent and 27.7 per cent respectively having one or more years of graduate work.2 The paper will deal with four topics: (i) the nature of the sample; (2) the criteria of adjustment; (3) whether or not divorced persons are good risks in subsequent marriages; and (4) marital prediction items. The Sample. The sample of divorced persons was secured by getting from the courthouse files all the names of couples divorced in the years immediately preceding the time of interviewing, and contacting everyone that could be located. The happily married sample was secured from the names of the most happily married known by a random sample of married persons. The divorced sample is composed of 20I persons and their respective former mates, plus I23 persons where only one side of the case was secured. The married group is composed of 200 persons with their respective mates. Thus, there are 925 individual cases.8 The cooperation of given persons of these two samples was secured through personal interviews by the author or by a person under his supervision. The subjects are almost exclusively, over 96 per cent, native born of native born parents. They are Protestants or of Protestant parents, and have a rural or small city background.4 It was expected that the divorced would have shorter marriages than the happily married. A larger per cent of divorced than happily married were married for each five year period up to and including I5-i9, and a larger per cent of happily married than divorced for each five-year period beginning with 20-24. The per cent of divorced and happily married whose marriages were of less than ten years' duration was respectively 56.o and 38.6. The average length of years married for the divorced was I0.7 and for the happily married i6.o. The educational level is similar to that of the general population. About half, 48.9 per cent, of the divorced and four out of ten, 43.7 per cent, of the happily married attained eighth grade or under in educa* Paper read before the Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Society, Chicago, Illinois, December 27-30, I946. 'The study was begun in I938 and most of the cases had been secured by the spring of I943. 2 Ernest W. Burgess and Leonard S. Cottrell, Predicting Success or Failure in Marriage, New York, Prentice-Hall, I939, pp. 24-2 7. Lewis M. Terman, et al., Psychological Factors in Marital Happiness, New York, McGraw-Hill, I938, pp.