Marital Happiness and Psychological Well‐Being Across the Life Course*

• Author: Rhiannon A. Kroeger,Claire M. Kamp Dush,Miles G. Taylor
• Published date: 01 April 2008
• Date: 01 April 2008
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1741-3729.2008.00495.x

Marital Happiness and Psychological Well-Being

Across the Life Course*

Claire M. Kamp Dush Miles G. Taylor Rhiannon A. Kroeger**

Abstract: Using data from six waves of the Study of Marital Instability over the Life Course (N¼1,998), we con-

ducted a latent class analysis to test for distinct marital happiness trajectories. We found three distinct marital hap-

piness trajectories: low, middle, and high happiness. Initial levels of life happiness were strongly associated with

membership in the marital happiness trajectories and with various demographic and attitude-related control varia-

bles. Using fixed effects regression with time-varying covariates, we also found that marital happiness trajectory

membership was associated with subsequent changes in both life happiness and depressive symptoms. All respon-

dents experienced a decrease in life happiness between Wave 1 and the end of their observed time in their marriage,

but respondents in the high marital happiness trajectory experienced the smallest decline. Respondents in both the

high and middle marital happiness trajectories also experienced a decline in depressive symptoms across time. Inter-

vention and policy implications are discussed.

Key Words: depression, latent class analysis, marital happiness, marital satisfaction, well-being.

In February 2006, President George W. Bush reau-

thorized the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families

program and extended the original legislation such

that,currently,$100millionayearisprovidedfor

programs that promote healthy marriage via the

Healthy Marriage Initiative. One of the main theoret-

ical assumptions of this legislation is that adults are

better off in terms of health and psychological well-

being if living in households having marital unions.

However, recent evidence has suggested that marriage

is not beneficial for all spouses with respect to health

and well-being (Hawkins & Booth, 2005; Williams,

2003). Our study extends this work by using latent

class methods to establish trajectories of marital happi-

ness and then linking trajectories of marital happiness

to both positive and negative aspects of psychological

well-being. We used six waves of data from the Study

of Marital Instability over the Life Course (Booth,

Johnson, Amato, & Rogers, 2003), collected from

1980 to 2000, to examine these associations.

Marital Happiness Over Time

In the marital literature, marital quality or health

has been broadly defined. For example, marital hap-

piness, marital conflict, marital commitment, social

support, marital interaction, marital discord, for-

giveness, and domestic violence have each been con-

ceptualized as dimensions of marital quality and are

sometimes combined as a single indicator of marital

quality (Stanley, 2007). Marital scholars have re-

cently critiqued research that uses global indicators

of marital quality, particularly widely used global

evaluators that include the Dyadic Adjustment Scale

*This research was supported by the Institute for the Social Sciences at Cornell University and by a National Institute on Child Health and Human Development grant

1K01HD056238-01 to the first author, and by a National Institute on Aging grant 5F32AG026926-02 to the second author. We thank Frank D. Fincham, Scott M.

Stanley, Elaine Wethington, and members of the Cornell University Institute for the Social Sciences Evolving Family Theme Project for helpful comments on earlier

drafts of this paper.

**Claire M. Kamp Dush is an assistant professor in the Department of Human Development and Family Science, The Ohio State University, 171A Campbell Hall,

1787 Neil Avenue, Columbus, OH 43210 (kamp-dush.1@osu.edu). Miles Taylor is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Carolina Population Center, University of North

Carolina at Chapel Hill CB# 8120, University Square, 123 West Franklin Street, Chapel Hill, NC 27516-2524 (mtaylor@unc.edu). Rhiannon Kroeger is a doctoral

student in the Department of Sociology, The Ohio State University, 300 Bricker Hall, 190 N. Oval Mall, Columbus, OH 43210 (kroeger.36@sociology.osu.edu).

Family Relations, 57 (April 2008), 211–226. Blackwell Publishing.

Copyright 2008 by the National Council on Family Relations.

(Spanier, 1976) and the Marital Adjustment Test

(Locke & Wallace, 1959). Scholars have called

instead for a more nuanced view of various indica-

tors of marital quality (Amato, Booth, Johnson, &

Rogers, 2007; Fincham & Beach, 2006). We chose

to focus our investigation on a single dimension of

marital quality—marital happiness, that is, an over-

all appraisal of the degree of happiness with various

dimensions of one’s marriage. Marital happiness is

a powerful indicator of marital quality, although it

does not capture specific behavioral correlates. For

example, marital happiness correlates with other

indicators of marital quality, such as marital interac-

tion, marital conflict, marital problems, and divorce

proneness (Amato et al., 2007). Marital happiness

has also been found to correlate with the presence of

children in the household, household income, wel-

fare use, egalitarian attitudes, traditional marital atti-

tudes, religiosity (Amato et al., 2007), and the

interdependence of familial and friendship networks

(Kearns & Leonard, 2004). Thus, we use the term

‘‘marital happiness’’ to indicate variables used in

past research to measure satisfaction or happiness

with various domains of the marriage. We use ‘‘mar-

ital quality’’ to indicate global evaluations of mar-

riage that may include behavioral indicators (such as

the amount of conflict) or indicators of social com-

parison (e.g., would the respondent marry his/her

spouse again if they had their life to live over).

Examples of marital quality measures include the

aforementioned Marital Adjustment Test and

Dyadic Adjustment Scale.

Thus far, much of the work on marital happiness

over the life course has focused on mean changes in

marital happiness over time. Previous work found

that marital happiness followed a U-shaped curve,

declining in the early years of marriage and increas-

ing through the later years (Glenn, 1989; Peterson,

1990). More recently, scholars have attributed the up-

turn in the U-shaped curve to the cross-sectional data

used in earlier work (Glenn, 1998). VanLaningham,

Johnson, and Amato (2001), also using the Study of

Marital Instability over the Life Course with fixed

effects pooled-time series methods, found that mari-

tal happiness declined at all measured durations.

Similarly, Umberson, Williams, Powers, Chen, and

Campbell (2005) used growth curve analysis and found

that, in general, marital quality declined over time.

The marital population, however, is heteroge-

neous. Attempts to illuminate the diversity of mari-

tal experiences across time have been few. In

a notable exception, Beach, Fincham, Amir, and

Leonard (2005) conducted a taxometric analysis of

the Marital Adjustment Test. This analysis indicated

that about 20% of respondents were dissatisfied with

their relationships or in discordant relationships,

whereas approximately 80% were free of discord or

satisfied with their relationships over time. In a vali-

dation of their taxometric analysis, Beach et al. also

found that discordant and nondiscordant couples

differed significantly on the Multidimensional Satis-

faction Scale (Kearns & Leonard, 2004), a measure

similar to our measure of marital happiness. We used

latent class analysis (LCA), a statistical method for

identifying unmeasured group membership among

subjects (Muthe

´n, 2004) to identify trajectories of

marital happiness over 20 years. We hypothesized

two trajectories of marital happiness over time. First,

we expected a low marital happiness trajectory char-

acterized by a consistent decline in marital happiness

over time. Considering the work of Beach et al., we

expected only a minority of respondents (roughly

20%) to demonstrate this low trajectory. Second, we

expected to find a high marital happiness trajectory

characterized by maintained high happiness over time.

Marital Happiness and Psychological Well-Being

Proulx, Helms, and Buehler (2007) recently con-

ducted a meta-analysis examining 93 studies of mar-

ital quality and individual well-being. They found

that marital quality and psychological well-being

were positively related both concurrently and over

time such that higher levels of marital quality were

associated with greater individual well-being. Yet,

each study that was cited in their analysis treated

marital quality as a continuous variable, and the

analysis did not explore whether the association

between marital quality and individual well-being

differed for highly satisfied versus dissatisfied mar-

riages. In an exception to this work that was not

included in the meta-analysis, Hawkins and Booth

(2005) identified unhappy marriages as those that

scored below the mean of marital happiness among

respondents who were present in each of the first

four waves of the Study of Marital Instability over

the Life Course. They found that spouses who were

continuously married and who reported a mean or

higher level of marital happiness had greater individ-

ual well-being over time than did continuously

unhappily married respondents, even after taking

into account initial levels of marital happiness. In

Family Relations Volume 57, Number 2 April 2008212