Social Class and Social Mobility Factors Related to Marital Adjustment

IN any stratified social order, marriage usually implies equality of status. Although the American class structure considered in this paper is not so rigid as the caste system discussed by Kingsley Davis in Intermarriage in Caste Societies,' the fact remains that strata exist and the family is placed in the class structure as a unit. This means that if a man and woman of different social levels marry, there must generally be a shift of status for one or both of them. The question arises: Does this necessary shift of status affect the subsequent adjustment of the spouses? Ruesch, Jacobson, and Loeb point out the feelings of stress, frustration, and confusion which often accompany the acculturation of immigrants.2 The greater the degree of culture difference, the greater the maladjustment of the individual is likely to be. The differences in the characteristics of the social classes in our society indicate that these classes are different cultural groups. A person moving from one class to another must go through a process of acculturation similar to, though perhaps not so extreme as, that of an immigrant. In some cases a shift of status of one or both spouses has taken place before marriage. A certain amount of stress and insecurity in social situations may thus be brought into the marriage relationship by one or both partners. This possibility suggests a second major problem: Do the premarital mobility patterns of the spouses affect the subsequent marital adjustment? A fairly large group of cases which had some rating of marital adjustment and some