The Assessment of Marital Quality: A Reevaluation

This article examines afundamental problem in research using self-report measures of marriage: attempts have been made to measure and explain variance in quality without adequate understanding and specification of the construct of marital quality. A specific consequence of this shortcoming is that quality is not readily distinguished from other relevant constructs (e.g., communication). This, in turn, results in measures that have a great deal of overlap in item content, thus preventing clear interpretation of the empirical relationship between the constructs. The inability to establish unambiguous empirical relationships among relevant constructs severely limits theory development in this research domain. One means of avoiding these problems is to treat quality solely as the global evaluation of one's marriage. The implications of this strategy are examined in regard to three issues that have received insufficient attention in research: (a) the association between empirical and conceptual dependence; (b) the interpretation of responses to self-report inventories; and (c) the consideration of the purpose for which quality is measured. The advantages of adopting this approach, and the conditions under which it is most appropriate to do so, are also outlined.