The Measurement of Marital Strain

Abstract

For an investigation of marital strain based on assumptions regarding roles and expectations, the "Marital Roles Inventory" was used to yield two sets of findings. By the "Index of Strain," the difference was measured between performance and expectations of roles of a particular married couple; by the "Index of Deviation," the difference was measured between the rank order assigned to the roles by a given subject and the total sample's modal rank ordering of the same set of roles. Correlations between the findings arrived at by the various techniques and the marital-adjustment scores show the validity of the method in measuring strain in marriage.