Adjustment, Conservatism, and Marital Conventionalization

Abstract

Data from three independent samples indicate that marital adjustment scales in general, and the Locke-Wallace Scale in particular, are heavily contaminated by subjects' tendencies to distort the appraisals of their marriages in the direction of social desirability. When this distorting tendency, defined here as marital conventionalization, is held constant via partial correlation techniques, no significant correlations remain between marital adjustment as measured and the conservative indexes of traditional family morality, religious activity, ascetic morality, church attendance, or premarital sexual abstinence. A substantial negative correlation emerges, however, between marital adjustment and general conservative ideology. If one looks into the science and lore dealing with marriage and family life he will encounter a widespread conviction, expressed with varying degrees of caution and generality, that persons with conservative perspectives and behavior are more happily married than persons who do not share such conservative perspectives and behavior. This conviction, of course, had its origin in the mores of American society, but was logically buttressed by the publication and dissemination of scientific studies of marital happiness in the nineteen twenties and thirties (Davis, 1929; Burgess and Cottrell, 1939; Terman, 1938). Terman's summation of the conservative