Marital Paradigms: A Conceptual Framework for Marital Attitudes, Values, and Beliefs

This article outlines a conceptual framework for summarizing the marital beliefs and values of individuals regardless of marital status. Drawing on concepts from symbolic interactionism and recent midrange theories of marital attitudes, we propose that marital beliefs can be conceptualized as an individual marital paradigm, which comprises both beliefs about getting married and beliefs about being married. Six interconnected dimensions of marital paradigms are proposed: marital salience, marital timing, martial context, marital processes, marital permanence, and marital centrality. We proceed to make connections between the proposed model and relevant recent research on marital attitudes.