Marital Conventionalization Revisited

Abstract

Edmonds' (1967) recommendation of the Marital Conventionalization Scale as a control variable involved inherent violations of two statistical assumptions underlying partial correlation and multiple regression techniques. Interpretations of results from using the scale as Edmonds (1967) suggested appear to increase the probability of Type II errors. Deleting conventionalizing subjects from the analysis appears to be a better way to assess the impact of social desirability upon measures of marital adjustment or satisfaction. In general, concerns about the impact of social desirability or conventionalization upon marital adjustment scores or relationships between marital adjustment and other variables appear to be overstated in previous research.