Marital Satisfaction - Remarriage
You will recall that the Marital Opinion Questionnaire was used to obtain a global assessment of each spouse's satisfaction with the marriage. The questionnaire, adapted from a measure of life satisfaction (Campbell, Converse, & Rodgers, 1976), involves two parts: (a) a series of 7-point semantic differential scales in which respondents characterize their relationship with bipolar adjectives, such as miserable-enjoyable, rewarding-disappointing, discouraging-hopeful, and (b) a single-item 7-point global assessment of the respondent's overall satisfaction with the marriage.
Divorced respondents who had remarried (or were in a very serious non-marital relationship) rated their overall satisfaction with their new relationship, considering the past two months. Following Campbell and his colleagues, the average rating of the eight semantic differential items that clustered together in a series of factor analyses was added to the score on the overall assessment of marital satisfaction and divided by two to create an index of marital satisfaction with possible scores ranging from low (1) to high (7) marital satisfaction.
Finding
Overall marital satisfaction can be found on the Divorced Data Packet cover sheet.
Interpreting
If either of the partners in your couple has remarried, discuss your ideas about whether or not you think the new relationship will succeed. Consider how long the new relationship has lasted. How satisfied is your individual at this point? Are they more or less satisfied than they were with the PAIR marriage at the same point in its development? Do you think your individual has changed? Did they meet a better person this time around? Or are they doomed to repeat past mistakes?
Divorce Table of Contents