The interrelatedness of spouses' adjustment in sibling relations, marital adjustment, and conventionalization

This study was an investigation of spouses' present perceptions of their adjustment in their most significant sibling relationship during childhood and adolescence as predictors of the couples' present marital adjustment. Within the process of this investigation, the effect of removing the contributions of conventionalization from both the predictor variables and the criterion variable was examined.

Data were collected from 77 intact couples, systematically chosen in five states. The instruments used were the Systematic Relations in Sibling Relations (Yourglich & Scheissl, 1966), the Modified Form of Locke's Marital Questionnaire (Kimmel & van der Veen, 1974), the Marital Conventionalization scale (Edmonds, 1967) , and a sociodemographic instrument. Multiple regression analyses were used to test the strength of the independent variables to predict the dependent variable. Also, the interrelations among these variables, as well as selected sociodemographic variables, were investigated through a correlational analysis.

The results of the regression analyses were not significant. Marital conventionalization was related strongly to marital adjustment for both spouses. It was concluded that perhaps conventionalization is an integral element of marital adjustment rather than a contaminant of the measure of marital adjustment as previously described by Edmonds (1967).