Buy Marital Adjustment Discussion Essay

Marital adjustment has been shown to identify factors related to family dysfunction, as it seems to mediate adaptive or deficit functioning within areas of married life (Bugaighis et al. 1986). Several scales have been developed to evaluate marital quality, including the Locke-Wallace Marital Adjustment Scale, Dyadic Adjustment Scale and the Marital Satisfaction Inventory.

In 1951 the Locke-Wallace Marital Adjustment Test (LMAT) was created and became the most used and validated instrument created to measure marital quality (Bagarozzi, 1985). It is a test designed to measure individual perceptions of each partner (Cross & Sharpley, 1982). This scale has been used to classify married couples into high or low adjustment categories. This scale viewed marital adjustment as a process of adapting, in which both partners must try to resolve conflicts so that both partners will feel satisfied with one another. By doing so, partners can then develop common interests and activities so that the marriage fulfills their individual expectations. The major criticism of this test was that it had methodological weakness. This test uses individual assessments of the relationship from each partner to indicate adjustment, thus the Dyadic Adjustment test was created (Bagarozzi, 1985).

In 1976 the Dyadic Adjustment Scale (DAS) was developed to assess marital quality (Bagarozzi, 1985). It was developed in order to introduce a scale with stronger psychometric properties and broader applications (Kazak et al. 1988). This scale not only included married couples, but also couples who were co-habiting. It was also validated to discriminate between high and low martial –adjustment categories (Cross & Sharpley, 1982). The scale had been used on over 1,000 studies, which suggests that there is a need for such a measure (Spanier, 1988). This scale refined dyadic adjustment as a process and an outcome of marital quality (Graham et al. 2006). So, marital adjustment was viewed as more of a degree in a continuing and changing process of marriage and not as a single transition of being either a high or low adjustment (Demir & Fisiloglu, 2000). It works best as a global summary measure (Spanier, 1988). A major critic of this scale is that it relies on the individual's internal emotions as an evaluation of the marriage. Bagarozzi (1985) suggested that the LMAT and DAS were used as projective tests so that partners could identify their subjective values and then continue to evaluate the marital dyad.

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