Students' Expectations and Optimism Toward Marriage as a Function of Parental Divorce

The Marital Scales: Measurement of Intent, Attitudes, and Aspects Regarding Marital Relationships

“…Some studies have used a few of the items from existing scales such as the Attitudes Toward Marriage Scale (ATMS), to indicate an individual's intent to marry (Boyer-Pennington, Pennington, & Spink, 2001). Other studies have relied on asking questions about expectations to marry on a Likert scale, where participants indicate the degree to which they agree with a statement such as "I would like to be married now" (Crissey, 2005;Riggio & Weiser, 2008;Willoughby & Carroll, 2010).…”

“…Other scales, such as the Marriage Role Expectation Inventory (Dunn, 1960), assess the type of roles one might have in a married relationship based on traditional or egalitarian stereotypes. Another group of scales assess overall positive or negative attitudes toward marriage, such as the ATMS (Kinnaird & Gerrard, 1986) and the Marital Attitudes Scale (Braaten & Rosén, 1998), and have been used in research on divorce outcomes (Boyer-Pennington et al, 2001;Gabardi & Rosén, 1991, 1992. The Marriage Role Expectation Inventory (MREI) and the List of Expectations From Marriage (Slosarz, 2002) examine expectations relating to marriage roles in traditional and egalitarian terms (Dunn, 1960).…”

“…The ATMS assesses overall positive and negative attitudes toward marriage. The scale has also been used in research examining general attitudes toward marriage (e.g., Boyer-Pennington et al, 2001;Gassanov et al, 2008). Similar to the MAS, it was expected that the new instrument would correlate highly with the ATMS as further validation of good convergent validity.…”

Family Structure, Interparental Conflict and Parenting as Correlates of Children's Relationship Expectations

“…Some researchers have reported that adult children of divorce have more negative beliefs regarding relationships than those from intact families (Boyer-Pennington et al, 2001). Studies conducted with young adults have also found that those from divorced families have lower expectations and less positive attitudes towards relationships than young adults who grew up in intact families (Boyer-Pennington et al, 2001). However, these findings pertain only to expectations of marriage; that is, respondents were asked questions only in regard to their attitude towards marriage.…”

“…For example, children's experience of parental divorce, children's parenting experiences (e.g., hostile or neglectful parenting), and parent conflict/dyadic adjustment are likely to be correlates of children's optimistic or pessimistic expectations of other people. Children's family experiences have been shown to be important to how they come to view their relationships with others, whether they expect others to be accepting or rejecting, and whether they are worthy of positive regard from others (Boyer-Pennington, Pennington, & Spink, 2001). However, most of this research has focused on children's functioning in the areas of internalising and externalising problems, rather than on their view of others and relationships (Jekielek, 1998).…”