Marital Quality: A Review of the Seventies

The quality of marital relationships continues to be the most widely studied topic in the field. Trends during the 1970s in research on marital quality and related concepts (happiness, satisfaction, adjustment, etc.) are summarized. The decade saw more husbands in samples, more attention to couples and joint assessment of husbands and wives, use of observational data collection techniques, greater attention to methodological and measurement issues, more use of multivariate statistics, greater awareness of issues pertaining to cross-sectional designs, fewer biases in the portrayal of male/female roles, attempts to build theory and synthesize the literature, growing interest in dyads as a more general form of marital relationships, and more research which is international in scope. Research, methodological, and theoretical contributions are evaluated, and some recommendations are made for the decade ahead.