Predicting Marital Quality with Narrative Assessments of Marital Experience

Veroff, Joseph; Sutherland, Lynne; Chadiha, Letha A.; Ortega, Robert M.

doi:10.2307/352805

Cited by 43 publications

(36 citation statements)

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“…Researchers and clinicians interested in the early stages of couple formation and the endurance of satisfactory relationships found family narratives a useful resource. Narrative assessments were used with couples to collect stories about how they met, how they became interested in one another, and what married life is like (Holmberg, Orbuch, & Veroff, 2004;Veroff, Sutherland, Chadiah, & Ortega, 1993). Story content was related to how satisfied couples were with their relationships and how likely they were to remain married years later.…”

Section: Family Storiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Family Stories and Rituals

Fiese

Winter

2009

The Wiley‐Blackwell Handbook of Family Psychology

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I remember a dinnertime when it was Christmas or something like that and mamma would bring out a big turkey, and we would have ham, and beets, and homemade biscuits. And we would sit around and eat. And there was my aunt, uncle, grandmother, grandfather, and cousins, too. I remember my uncle would say a prayer before dinner, bless our food and our family. Or my grandfather might say it, my grandfather was a deacon in the church, and I always loved it when grandfather said the prayer because it was the shortest prayer in the world. Jesus wept. And that was it and we just dove in and that was it. Sometimes there would be other kids over and we would have a little table in the corner and we would eat, the kids, while the adults had the big table to themselves. And I remember that being a 'specially nice time. A lot of laughing, and cutting, and scraping, and eating and talking and all those kinds of good things. (Story told to 5-year-old about her father's meal-time experiences)One of the challenges in family psychology is capturing how the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. While the subsystems of the family (parent-child, partner-partner, sibling-sibling) are essential to understanding the health and wellbeing of individuals, how the family operates as a group provides an important window into its values, meaning-making process, and affect regulation. Families come together as a group in a variety of ways. They have dinners together, meet for special celebrations, and tell stories to reminisce about memorable events and reinforce collective values. They practice routines to provide order to their lives and create rituals to impart meaning and cement bonds.Family life is organized on multiple levels, some directly accessible to outsiders through observation and some detectable only through careful interviewing. What can be seen by others is often referred to as the "practicing family"; what is accessed through interviews and closely held beliefs is considered the "representing family" (Fiese & The Wiley-Blackwell Handbook of Family Psychology Edited by James H. Bray and Mark Stanton

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Section: Family Storiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Family Stories and Rituals

Fiese

Winter

2009

The Wiley‐Blackwell Handbook of Family Psychology

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“…For example, Veroff and colleagues (Veroff, Sutherland, Chadiha, & Ortega, 1993a, 1993b provide examples of how spouses' narratives can be used in marital research. In a similar vein, Buehlman and colleagues (Buehlman, Gottman, & Katz, 1992) have developed an oral history interview for use with couples based on the interview methods of the journalist Studs Terkel (Buehlman & Gottman, 1996).…”

Section: Snapshots Are Not Home Videos: a Longitudinal Perspectivementioning

confidence: 99%

Child Development and Marital Relations

Fincham¹

1998

Child Development

134

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This article examines aspects of the marital relationship and its assessment relevant to scholars of child development. The case for attending to marriage in child research is outlined before reviewing what is known about the construct of marital quality, behavior, emotional responding, and cognition in marriage. Practical recommendations are made for assessing each of these areas before arguing that the child's perspective of the marriage is critical for understanding children's behavior. Several limitations and promises of marital research for understanding children are also discussed. INTRODUCTIONSince its inception in the 1920s, empirical research on marriage has yielded a great deal of information. However, this information is scattered across a variety of disparate sources, making it difficult for researchers outside of the marital field to access the picture of marriage painted by scientific research. In this article I highlight some aspects of the marital relationship and its assessment that may be useful to scholars of child development. Notwithstanding the importance of disrupted marital relationships for children, the focus is on intact marriages and on the contribution of psychological research to a scientific understanding of marriage.The article is divided into five sections. In the first section I address briefly why child researchers should pay attention to marriage. The second section provides a quick tour of the marital literature that includes discussion of the most frequently studied construct in the marital literature, marital quality, and practical recommendations for selecting a measure of this construct; reviews of what is known about behavior (including affective behavior) and about cognition in marriage; and guidance on how to obtain indices of behavior and cognition in marriage. A critical question for researchers concerns the perspective from which to study marriage, an issue discussed in the third section. The fourth section highlights some further promises and problems of marital research relevant to child research before the main points and limitations of the article are summarized in the concluding section. WHY CONSIDER THE MARITAL RELATIONSHIP WHEN STUDYING CHILDREN?In this section I examine briefly why the marital relationship is important for understanding child development, considering first conceptual and then empirical reasons for its importance. The section concludes by offering a perspective on research relating marital and child functioning that further supports examination of what the marital literature might have to offer child research. Conceptual PerspectivesSeveral theoretical frameworks that have influenced the study of child development recognize the importance of the marital relationship. For example, psychoanalytic theory has viewed marital disruption as affecting the child's sense of security and the development of delinquency. In a similar vein, social learning theory suggests that children learn how to behave in relationships through observing parental interac...

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“…7) and assesses how memories are formed and organized or how experiences are structured. The capacity to generate a coherent account or "story" regarding one's life and relationships has been linked to improved functioning in interpersonal relationships (e.g., Main & Goldwyn, 1984), and more specifically, to the quality of marital relationships over time (Veroff, Sutherland, Chadiah, & Ortega, 1993). …”

Section: Narrative Analysesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The study of narratives refers to the "mode of thinking" (Fiese & Sameroff, p. 7) and assesses how memories are formed and organized or how experiences are structured. The capacity to generate a coherent account or "story" regarding one's life and relationships has been linked to improved functioning in interpersonal relationships (e.g., Main & Goldwyn, 1984), and more specifically, to the quality of marital relationships over time (Veroff, Sutherland, Chadiah, & Ortega, 1993).Fiese and colleagues broadened the construct of narrative to address the meaning-making processes embedded within relationship contexts and interactions. Through interviews with families, narrative analyses capture families' beliefs about relationships, views of the world, and their expectations for one another.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Convergence and divergence among multiple methods for assessing adolescent romantic relationships

Galliher

Enno

Wright

2008

Journal of Adolescence

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The problem solving conversations of 92 adolescent romantic couples were analyzed using two innovative techniques for capturing the meaning-making processes in couples' interactions. Couples were coded using the narrative coding system developed by the Family Narrative Consortium (Fiese & Sameroff, 1999), yielding measures of narrative coherence for each couple member and an assessment of couples' capacity to engage in the interaction in a coordinated and mutually respectful manner. In addition, a video-recall procedure captured couple members' own subjective understanding of their own and their partners' behaviors during the interaction. Moderate associations were observed between trained coders', boyfriends', and girlfriends' perspectives, with more consistent links in some domains between girlfriends' ratings and observers' codes. In addition, indices of the quality of the interaction were linked to couple member global self reports of both positive and negative relationship quality, with many associations between observed interaction and global self reports of relationships quality achieving moderate effect sizes.Researchers from varying methodological traditions have devoted much effort over the past decade to improving understanding of developmental processes, significance, and functioning in adolescent romantic relationships (e.g., Florsheim, 2003;. Many prominent adolescent romantic relationship researchers have roots in the study of family and peer relationships (Laursen & Collins, 2004;Powers & Welsh, 1999;Rosén, Furman, & Hartup, 1988;Shulman, & Ben-Artzi, 2003;Welsh, Galliher, & Powers, 1998), and have adapted both theory and methods for the purpose of understanding the development and salience of romantic relationships during adolescence. A rich history of the use of observational methodologies to understand relationship processes in the family, peer, and marital literatures has served as a foundation for much of the developing body of knowledge regarding adolescent romance (e.g., Aspland & Gardner, 2003;Gottman, Swanson, & Swanson, 2002;Goudena & Vermande, 2002;Noller & Feeney, 2002;Patterson, Dishion, & Bank, 1984). Observational procedures have generated a wealth of information about behaviors, and patterns of behavior, associated with optimal individual and relationship functioning, both concurrently and over time.Address correspondence to Renee V. Galliher, Ph.D., Dept. of Psychology, Utah State University, 2810 Old Main Hill, Logan, UT 84322. Publisher's Disclaimer: This is a PDF file of an unedited manuscript that has been accepted for publication. As a service to our customers we are providing this early version of the manuscript. The manuscript will undergo copyediting, typesetting, and review of the resulting proof before it is published in its final citable form. Please note that during the production process errors may be discovered which could affect the content, and all legal disclaimers that apply to the journal pertain. NIH Public Access NIH-PA Author ManuscriptNIH-PA Author...

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Predicting Marital Quality with Narrative Assessments of Marital Experience

Cited by 43 publications

References 0 publications

Family Stories and Rituals

Family Stories and Rituals

Child Development and Marital Relations

Convergence and divergence among multiple methods for assessing adolescent romantic relationships

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