No description available.

M.A. (Clinical Psychology) / The institution of marriage rests upon shared expectations of appropriate marital behaviour including those of sexual fidelity and lifetime partnership. Therefore, a wife whose husband has been convicted of rape, experiences a violation in her marriage. The experience of the marital relationship of convicted rapists is not a well-documented phenomenon, particularly from the offenders’ wives’ perspectives. A qualitative, phenomenological approach was adopted to explore the experience and the meanings that participants attributed to the phenomenon of the marital relationship with a convicted rapist. Descriptions of such experiences were sourced from open-ended interviews conducted with three participants. Participant interviews were transcribed and analysed using an interpretative phenomenological analysis. Despite the distinctiveness of the participants’ individual experiences, the researcher identified five superordinate themes common across the three participants’ descriptions. These themes are encapsulated as follows: (a) Wives’ positive experiences of their marital relationship; (b) Wives’ negative experiences of their marital relationship; (c) Wives’ ambivalent experiences in their marital relationship; (d) Wives’ emotional experiences as a consequence of their former husbands’ convictions for rape; and (e) Wives’ experiences of stigmatisation. The findings have potential implications for future research.

M.A.(Counselling Psychology) / Please refer to full text to view abstract

The primary objective of the study was to increase understanding of interpersonal dimensions of stress and coping within married couples. Using a diary methodology and a matched-pair hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) analysis strategy, the study examined how stress and coping processes unfold over the course of a given day and across days within couples. The study investigated within-couple variation in daily stress, coping, coping efficacy, mood, and marital tension. Special emphasis was given to the examination of the correlates and consequences of empathic responding, a form of relationship focused coping. The results suggest that when relational outcomes are considered, empathic responding may represent an adaptive way of coping with everyday stress occurring within intimate contexts. Moreover, the study indicates that when greater personal significance is attached to a family stressor, husbands and wives tend to increase their use of empathic responding. The findings suggest that the examination of relationship-focused coping may add to the theoretical and explanatory power of current models of stress and coping. Also considered were the contextual effects of marital adjustment on how family stressors are experienced and managed by couples. The results document a link between marital adjustment and the use of empathic responding for both husbands and wives within couples. Further, the study suggests that marital adjustment plays an important role in determining whether the negative effects of stress will persist across days. / Arts, Faculty of / Psychology, Department of / Graduate

No description available.

M. S.

M. S.

The aim of the study was to determine the influence/effect of discourses on love and marriage in the lives of people from their childhood uptil this day. Twelve people participated in the study. These participants were defined as being "white, Afrikaans speaking, married couples between 30 and 50 years of age, with or without children and belonging to a church in the RSA of the Reformed tradition". The study sought to discover how people respond to dominent and marginalised discourses on love and marriage and how they portray this in their marital relationship. A further objective was to reflect on some modernistic descriptions of discourses on love and marriage and the deconstruction thereof. Factors such as the marital relationship of the parents, peer groups, church dogma and theological interpretation, sex education at the time they grew up, culture, customs, etc. were related by each participant and contextualised within each life story. Interviews were conducted with each participant / Practical Theology / M. Th. (Pastoral Therapy)

The relationship between personality type as measured by the Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) and marital satisfaction as measured by the Marital Satisfaction Inventory (MSI) was examined in this research. Subjects were 100 volunteer couples from a southwestern urban area who were given the MBTI and the MSI. These couples were divided into three groups: 40 were in marital therapy; 30 had satisfactory marriages and had been married seven years or less; 30 also had satisfactory marriages, but had been married more than seven years. The therapy group and the satisfactorily married groups were compared as to the number of MBTI preferences held in common, the strength of these preferences and the length of time married. The extraversion-introversion (E-I) scale and the sensing-judging (S-J) temperament of the MBTI were examined by comparing the spousal combinations in each of the groups. Chi square analysis and a Pearson correlation were used. A one-way analysis of variance was run between six of the scales of the MSI and each of the four MBTI dimensions. A MANOVA was attempted on the relationship between the spousal MBTI combinations and the six MSI scales, but the population was too small for this analysis to be conclusive. There were no significant differences between the groups as far as number of preferences held in common, length of time married, and the sensing-judging temperament. There were significantly more couples in the therapy group who had differences of 40 or more points on the four MBTI scales. The extent of the difference on the sensing-intuitive (S-N) scale was found to discriminate between satisfactory and unsatisfactory marriages. Differences on the E-I scale were found to effect couples' satisfaction in the MSI scales of Time Together and Affective Communication with the combination of introvert with introvert having the most difficulty in these areas.

M.A. / Of late there has been an accelerated impetus in the study of marriage and its associated issues. A veritable deluge of research articles are regularly devoted to the topic, for example Hatfield and Sprecher (1986); Fincham and Bradbury (1987); Dion and Dion (1993); Kamo (1993). There has also been some recent South African research on marriage and mate selection, particularly Crous and Pretorius (1994). New books appear with striking regularity while instruments to measure aspects of relationships are readily available. These include Hendrick and Hendrick's Love Attitude Scale, Spanier's Dyadic Adjustment Scale, and Rubin's Love Scale (Tzeng, 1993). Relationships, love and marriage are becoming increasingly measurable and as more questions become answered, researchers are able to unravel some of the complexity within the field. Adams (1988) looks back at fifty years of family research to discover that it has become increasingly scientific despite dealing with so-called "soft" variables like adjustment and attitudes. When even more elusive constructs like satisfaction, contentment and love are introduced, social scientists find that the terrain might be uncomfortably abstract. However, it is anticipated that as this domain, once only the estate of poets and philosophers becomes steadily more understood, it will bear fruit by answering questions which can then be profitably applied in many couplecounselling situations. The concepts of mate selection, marriage and familial stability are at the heart of societal functioning. There are a myriad of variables that impact on these constructs, as is evident from Surra's (1990) decade review. Recent research has shed some light, albeit theoretical, on the reasons why two people form a marital dyad. Social scientists are thus slowly building a solid mass of knowledge relating to the entire process of how and why a couple eventually exist. This goes hand in hand with contemporary urgency, for the accelerating forces of career, sociological, psychological and economic pressures play havoc with older traditional values of stability and permanence in all these domains. Soaring divorce rates are only one symptom of couples and individuals buckling under these tremendous pressures. Clearly, whatever can be done to better understand the choices individuals make in forming marital dyads, can only be regarded as useful information. In the South African context, this type of research is similarly required. With the wealth of family and marriage research being done abroad, it is important to know if this information applies to South African couples. Thus the primary motivation for the study is to better understand the way South Africans love. Lee's (1976) treatise is widely accepted as a valuable model of love. To date no work appears to have been done using this model in South Africa. The aims of this study thus are: To determine if there is any relationship between the various lovestyles and marital satisfaction for a South African sample. To examine several contemporary models of love.