Personality, sociodemographic characteristics and the quality of marriage

Subota, Terezija. (2007). Personality, sociodemographic characteristics and the quality of marriage. Diploma Thesis. Filozofski fakultet u Zagrebu, Department of Psychology. [mentor Bratko, Denis].

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Abstract

The goal of this research has been to add to the understanding of the connection between personality, sociodemographic characteristics of spouses and the quality of marriage. Subjects (N=128) were married couples who filled in the questionnaires concerning their personality characteristics (IPIP, Goldberg), quality of marriage (MAT, Locke and Wallace) and sociodemographic characteristics. From the measured sociodemographic characteristics, only the length of dating showed positive correlation with the evaluation of their marital quality, while children, financial independency upon their spouse, religion and national heterogamy had negative correlation. Wives, in average, score more on the dimensions of agreeableness and conscientiousness, whereas on the other dimensions (extraversion, emotional stability and intellect) and the evaluation of their marital quality, they do not differ from their husbands. There is a substantial correlation between spouses in evaluating their marital quality, but not between theirs personalities. It supports the hypothesis that people don't search for similarity of personalities in their future spouses; neither that similarity of personality is the product of marriage. In this study, personality traits had significant correlations with marital quality: husbands who score high on emotional stability, agreeableness and conscientiousness; and wives who score high on emotional stability have evaluated their marriages as more satisfying. Similarity on spouses personalities in dimensions of agreeableness and emotional stability are connected with higher marital quality, as well as marriages where wives score more than their husbands on the dimension of extraversion, and marriages where husbands score more than their wives on the dimension of conscientiousness. We explored the connection between the sums of the differences between the partners in all dimensions of personality with their marital quality, and conducted its negative connection, especially for men.

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