Predicting marital quality with narrative assessments of marital experience

From a longitudinal study of the first years of marriage, aspects of a joint narrative told by couples about their relationship were related to an assessment of marital quality. The analyses focused on selected measures from two coding systems applied to the narrative, one capturing the quality of affects mentioned in the narrative and the other identifying themes observed in the narrative. Several narrative measures taken in the first year of marriage were found to predict marital quality in the third year over and above relevant social demographic and psychological variables derived from standard survey questions. In particular, third-year marital happiness was positively associated with the frequency with which couples spontaneously mentioned relational affects in their stories during the first year, and whether they described their courtship as a positively accelerating experience. Other narrative themes were also shown to have a relationship to marital quality, but only for particular subsets of the sample. The general usefulness of this kind of systematic narrative approach within a reality construction perspective is discussed.