Marital attributions as a factor of relationship satisfaction among pairs with different duration of marriage

The problem of psychological factors of marital satisfaction is very important for the practices aimed at strengthening marriages and preventing divorce. Russian psychologists paid much attention on such factors as personality traits of spouses and their psychological compatibility, expectancies and roles, values, motives of marriage and so on. At the same time attribution approach which is very popular in world of psychology has never been applied in Russian researches on marriage. This approach is based on the investigations of causal attribution by B. Winer and F. Heider which have shown a great importance of attributions used to explain other people's behavior for social cognition and interpersonal relations. The literature review shows that the influence of marital causal attribution on relationship satisfaction is well established but there is no data about differences in this effect among pairs with different duration of marriage. We based this research on the hypothesis that the influence of attributions on relationship satisfaction is much stronger in pairs of long marriage duration. The second aim of our research was to elaborate and test Russian version of The Relationship Attribution Measure (by F.D. Fincham and T.N. Bradbury). As a measure of satisfaction we used the Russian version of the Relationship Assessment Scale (by S. Hendrick) and the Questionnaire of Marital Satisfaction (by V. Stolin). Sample comprised 42 pairs being married for different time (from 1 till 30 years). The results of our empirical research demonstrate perfect reliability of the suggested version of RAM and strong associations between the marital satisfaction and all dimensions of the marital attribution. Moderation analysis in SPSS (using MODPROBE macro) confirms the hypothesis that length of marriage is a significant moderator of association between the marital satisfaction and some dimensions of the marital attribution (locus, motivation and blame). This fact may be interpreted as a cumulative effect of negative attributions connected with spouse's responsibility and blame. The possible explanation of this fact is based on the suggestion that attributions have indirect influence on relationship satisfaction through subjective 'image of spouse'. The longer is experience of using negative attributions the worse is subjective 'image of spouse'. Cumulating negative effect of attributions the bad 'image of spouse' undermines the relationship satisfaction. According to the obtained results we conclude that the practice aimed at preventing divorce and low relationship satisfaction should include cognitive behavioral methods for correction of negative marital attribution.

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