Marital Role Expectations Research Articles

Orientations to Marriage among Young Canadians

This paper presents the results of a questionnaire study of 700 English speaking and 404 French speaking Canadian university and trade school students, dealing with attitudes toward a number of marital role issues. Factor analysis and step regression analysis procedures were used. Although the English speaking sample was generally more egalitarian in marital role expectations than the French speaking sample, this pattern was reversed on issues relating to the employment of the wife. Women were more egalitarian than men in both samples and English speaking men were more egalitarian than French speaking men, with the result that sex differences were more pronounced for the French language sample. The regression analysis showed that egalitarianism indices were better predicted for the French than for the English language data. These data suggest that there are more powerfully entrenched definitions of marital roles in the French-Canadian culture than in the Anglo- Canadian culture.