A study on marital quality of couples from urban area

Pages:48-54
Papia Mukherjee, Anindita Chaudhuri and Sonali De (Department of Psychology, University of Calcutta, Kolkata)

The joint family system has been one of the salient features of the Indian society since a long era. The enormous changes in the family system has documented over a period of century which increases the freedom of marital choice, greater involvement of females in decision making regarding family matter, rises level of education among women, greater conflict between husband and wife, incidence of separation and divorce. Changes in the traditional family system are steadily diminishing the joint family structure from the urban scene. Thus, the present study explores how the love attitude, feeling of security and motivation to acquire relationship threatening information of couples contribute to the marital quality of spouses from urban area in the present era. The sample consisted of 15 couples from joint family and 15 couples from nuclear family. The age of the participants ranged from 30 to 50 years, with minimum five years of length of marriage, from middle to higher socio economic group, at least graduate and having at least one offspring. The participants completed Love Attitude Scale, Indian Adaptation of Maslow’s Security-Insecurity feeling Inventory, Motivation to Acquire Relationship Threatening Information Scale and Martial Quality Scale. The data were analyzed using Stepwise Multiple Regression Analysis (SMRA) separately for females from joint family, females from nuclear family, males from joint family, and males from nuclear family. Result showed that Erotic Love contributes 20.8% to marital quality for the group of female from joint family and 15.9% to marital quality for the female from nuclear family. Thus, erotic love contributes to marital quality as a whole for the wives from joint as well as nuclear family. On the other hand Pragmatic Love contributes 19.9% to marital quality in case of male from nuclear family. In case of male from joint family, Feelings of security contributes 18.8% to the marital quality but, the result signifies that feeling of security influences negatively to the quality of marriage for the group of joint family male.