James Spencer
School of Family Life, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah, USA.
Marriage Fam Rev. 2014 Jan 1;50(8):738-763. doi: 10.1080/01494929.2014.938797.
Previous work on marital quality has compared average levels of marital quality by demographic characteristics, such as cohabitation, divorce, or race-ethnicity. Less work has examined whether such differences persist over time. To begin to answer this question, this paper uses multigroup latent growth curves to examine changes in marital quality over time in addition to measuring differences in levels of reported marital quality among cohabitors vs. non-cohabitors, divorced vs. stably married women, and members of different racial-ethnic groups. Although many of the differences are small and statistically insignificant, the results show that non-normative and traditionally disadvantaged groups experience not only lower levels of marital quality but that these differences also persist throughout the life course. I also show that using marital instead of relationship duration for cohabitors has substantive implications when interpreting the results.
先前关于婚姻质量的研究通过人口统计学特征（如同居、离婚或种族）比较了婚姻质量的平均水平。较少有研究考察这些差异是否会随时间持续存在。为了开始回答这个问题，本文使用多组潜在增长曲线来考察婚姻质量随时间的变化，此外还测量了同居者与非同居者、离婚女性与婚姻稳定女性以及不同种族群体成员在报告的婚姻质量水平上的差异。尽管许多差异较小且在统计学上不显著，但结果表明，非规范性和传统上处于劣势的群体不仅婚姻质量水平较低，而且这些差异在整个生命历程中也持续存在。我还表明，在解释结果时，对于同居者使用婚姻持续时间而非关系持续时间具有实质性影响。
