The Effects of Enjoyable Couple Activity and Common Dyadic Coping on Marital Satisfaction through Mediation of Sexual Intimacy: Focusing on Urban Chinese Women in the Early Years of Marriage

Abstract

The present study examined whether enjoyable couple activity and common dyadic coping as daily positive couple interactions have direct or indirect effects on marital satisfaction through the mediation of sexual intimacy among urban Chinese women in the early years of marriage. The subjects were 182 urban women born under the one-child policy, who live in Heilongjiang, Anhui and Beijing provinces of China, and have been married up to six years. Data were collected using a self-administered questionnaire. We conducted a hierarchical multiple regression analysis in SPSS software and tested the significance of the mediation effects using bootstrapping method in Mplus software. The results of the study are as follows. First, both enjoyable couple activity and common dyadic coping had positive direct impacts on urban Chinese women’s marital satisfaction and positive indirect impacts on marital satisfaction via sexual intimacy. Second, enjoyable couple activity was the strongest predictor of marital satisfaction, followed by common dyadic coping and sexual intimacy. The path model explained 48% of the variance in marital satisfaction. The results suggest that enjoyable couple activity, common dyadic coping, and sexual intimacy should be considered in the design of interventions to enhance urban Chinese women’s marital satisfaction in the early years of marriage.