According to Waite and Gallagher (2000), benefits and protections accruing to marriage are largely due to “commitment”. The long-term nature of commitment allows couples to risk specialising or letting go of domestic roles. This is an efficient arrangement in terms of time, stress and money. Commitment motivates couples to look out for one another, providing […]

In order to learn whether couples can improve their odds of staying happily married, thereby reducing rates of family breakdown, we need to know three things. (1) We need to know what risk factors make marriages more likely to succeed or fail. For example, we might reasonably assume that couples who are better-off or those […]

This article presents reliability and validity data for the 15-item ENRICH (evaluation and nurturing relationship issues, communication and happiness) Marital Satisfaction (EMS) Scale. The scale was found to be reliable and to have strong correlations with other measures of marital satisfaction and moderate relationships with measures of family satisfaction and consideration of divorce. The EMS […]

This paper investigates whether the health of children affects the likelihood that their parents divorce. This topic is relevant to the debate over whether the economic status of families affects children’s health: if the poor health of children promotes greater family dissolution, then children’s health problems could be the cause rather than the result of […]

In this study, we attempted to achieve a culturally sensitive adaptation of the PRE-marital Personal And Relationship Evaluation (PREPARE) Inventory with Japanese premarital couples (n = 849). A translation, back-translation, and construct modification process was initiated by a group of U.S. and Japanese researchers to ensue a culturally sensitive and applicable adaptation of PREPARE. Alpha […]