The “Marital Conventionalization” Argument; Implications for the Study of Religiosity and Marital Satisfaction

Abstract

The “marital conventionalization” argument set forth by Edmonds, Withers, and Dibatista (1972) claims that empirical relationships observed between measures of religiosity and marital satisfaction are spurious artifacts of the common contamination of such measures with social desirability/acquiescence response bias, identified by Edmonds (1967) as “marital conventionalization” and measured through the Marital Conventionalization Scale (MCS). More recently, Glenn and Weaver (1978) have adopted the “marital conventionalization” argument to discount the importance of the substantial, positive associations they observed between a religious variable and a measure of marital happiness. Data from two Kansas samples of husbands and wives were analyzed to evaluate the validity of the “marital conventionalization” argument. Results indicate that religiosity is an important predictor of marital satisfaction, at least in some samples, even among subjects who do not respond in a “conventionalizing” way to an abbreviated version of the MCS. Therefore, the limitations of the “marital conventionalization” argument should be considered prior to discounting empirical relationships found between religiosity and marital satisfaction as mere artifacts of social desirability or acquiescence response biases, as measured by the MCS.