The Locke Marital Adjustment Test and Social Desirability

MARITAL happiness or marital satisfaction measures have been criticized on many grounds.1 One criticism suggests that since failure or unhappiness in marriage is such a deplorable occurrence in our society, respondents would be loath to admit it. This tendency to conceal marital unhappiness would not likely be uniformly distributed in the population. Probably it would be especially prominent in persons with a strong need for being socially approved or presenting themselves in a socially desirable light. The discovery of the social desirability response set among others has threatened an otherwise sophisticated testing movement with the charge that its tests all measure the same thing. Unfortunately, methodological studies of marital satisfaction instruments have been few in number. Thus, it is not known whether these instruments too are open to the charge that the subject, compelled by a social desirability response set, informs the researcher not of his actual happiness but instead informs him of the degree of happiness thought to be socially appropriate. This note supplies some data on such criticism of one marital happiness test, the Locke Short Marital Adjustment Test.2