Using Paired Data to Test Models of Relational Maintenance and Marital Quality

Recent research has developed a good understanding of how maintenance behaviors are related to husbands’ and wives’ individual perceptions of marriage. Unfortunately, one of the limitations is that data have been collected from an individual spouse and may be misleading when applied to the relationship as a whole. The purpose of the present study was to test a procedure by which data collected from spouses can be used to examine joint couple-level concepts. Specifically, the study employs structural equation modeling with 129 married couples to examine the relationship between husbands’ and wives’ use of maintenance behaviors and joint couple-level constructs of marital quality. The final models for couple satisfaction, couple commitment, and couple love had good fits, indicating that individual use of maintenance behaviors has an influence upon couples’ marital quality. Also, wives’ overall use of maintenance behaviors had a stronger relationship with marital quality than did husbands’ use of maintenance behaviors.