Mexican-Origin Couples in the Early Years of Parenthood: Marital Well-Being in Ecological Context

Abstract

In this article, we draw from Huston's (2000) 3‐level model of marriage to provide an informed and integrative template for organizing current knowledge and guiding future inquiry into the study of marital well‐being among a rapidly growing segment of the United States' population: low‐income, Mexican‐origin couples in the early years of parenthood. More specifically, we advocate for a dyadic approach that attends to elements of the macroenvironment, such as cultural background, and how those elements interact directly and indirectly with spouses' individual characteristics and marital behavior. In so doing, we demonstrate the value of an ecological approach for understanding current research and for informing future work studying marriage among new parents of Mexican origin.

Spouses’ Gender Role Attitudes, Wives’ Employment Status, and Mexican-Origin Husbands’ Marital Satisfaction

“…In contrast to early writings that propose a more one-dimensional depiction of gender and marriage in Mexican origin couples (e.g., Bean et al, 1977;Penalosa, 1968;Ross et al, 1983), findings from the present study suggest that gendered roles and behaviors and their links with husbands' marital satisfaction are complex and cannot be understood in isolation from one another. Attention to interacting sources of influence, rather than main effects approaches, has been proposed by contemporary scholars advocating a more ecologically valid approach to the study of marriage (Huston, 2000), and marriage among immigrant Mexican couples, specifically (Helms et al, 2011). The findings from the current study further underscore the importance of such an approach and echo the sentiments expressed by Urie Bronfenbrenner over three decades ago in that "the principal main effects are likely to be interactions" (1979, p. 38).…”

“…The current study examined Mexican-origin husbands' marital satisfaction as predicted by the three-way interaction between wives' employment status, husbands' and wives' gender role attitudes, beyond the effects of dispositional and structural factors that have been empirically or theoretically linked to marital satisfaction: couples' legal marital status, husbands' years in the US, age of firstborn child, and additional adults living in the home (Casas & Ortiz, 1985;Cleary & Mechanic, 1983;Helms et al, 2011;Kurdek & Schmitt, 1986;Markides, Roberts-Jolly, Ray, Hoppe, & Rudkin, 1999;Rhyne, 1981). Informed by Peplau's framework and the extant literature on marital satisfaction, wives' employment status, and gender role attitudes, I hypothesized that husbands' marital satisfaction would be predicted by the interaction between spouses' gender role attitudes and wives' employment status.…”

“…Contemporary researchers underscore within-group variation in Mexican-origin spouses' gender role attitudes and women's employment and suggest their link with marital satisfaction is complex (Helms et al 2011;Lam, McHale, & Updegraff, 2012;Updegraff et al, 2007). To date, no studies have explicitly tested this link.…”

“…One hundred and twenty first-generation Mexican-origin couples who were (a) living together at the time of the study, (b) parents of their biological children, and (c) were legally married or were "living as married" in consensual unions were eligible for and participated in the larger study. Given the high prevalence of common law marriages in Latin American countries and that the many undocumented immigrant couples cannot legally marry in the United States, the inclusion of "living as married" couples is important to a more comprehensive definition of marriage among this population (De Vos, 1999;Helms et al, 2011;Wheeler, Updegraff, & Thayer, 2010). In addition, to be eligible for the study, at least one spouse had to be of Mexican origin, and both spouses had to be of Latin American origin.…”

Marital Conflict of Chinese American Immigrant Couples: A Mediator of Socioeconomic Incorporation and Children’s Behavioral Problems

“…Guided by culturally informed, ecological perspectives of marriage (Bodenmann and Bradbury 2007;Helms et al 2011;Karney and Bradbury 2005) and the family stress model (Story and Bradbury 2004), we applied SEM to Fig. 2 Structural model for family socioeconomic incorporation, child exposure to conflict, and children's behavioral problems.…”