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Two studies examine psychometric aspects of the seven-item version of the Dyadic Adjustment Scale (DAS) (Spanier, 1976). In Study 1, data from 148 heterosexual clients seeking marital therapy services and 122 heterosexual couples in the community were used to assess the criterion validity of the DAS-7. The measure differentiated between clinic and community participants and between marriages classified as distressed or adjusted based on the full DAS score. In Study 2, the reliability and convergent validity of the DAS7, when administered as a separate scale, was assessed in a community sample of 162 participants who were married or were in cohabiting heterosexual relationships. Obtained values were comparable to those reported in previous research in which the DAS-7 was obtained by extracting items from participants' full DAS. These results demonstrate that the DAS-7 is a psychometrically sound short form for assessing marital adjustment.

This study compares the motivation and the quality of criticism responses of 697 undergraduates who were divided into three levels of situation legitimacy (high, moderate, and low) and two levels (top versus bottom 40 percent) of anxiety related to previous generalized assertiveness behaviours. The impact of gender was also studied. The results showed the legitimacy of the situation for a critical response (preassessed with peer hold-out groups) significantly affected participants' motivation to criticize as well as the quality of their critical responses, notwithstanding the poor quality of all criticism responses. Anxiety related to previous global assertiveness was related to high motivation but not to quality of criticism responses. There were no gender effects. Results are interpreted within an avoidance learning paradigm wherein the connotative meaning of criticism is incongruent with harmonious long-term relationships so that it is suppressed until virtually forced by the specifics of highly legitimate situations.

This study systematically examined the effects of impression management biases on the reporting of dyadic relationship information. In an anonymous mail survey, 196 participants (101 women, 95 men) in marital or cohabiting relationships completed a measure of impression management and several relationship measures. Analyses indicated that impression management biases did not affect women's self-reports. Among men, impression management biases were significantly associated with many of their reports about their relationships. However, statistically controlling for these biases did not reduce the magnitude of correlations between measures of marital quality and the other relationship measures. Furthermore, partners' agreement about observable aspects of their relationship did not change when the influences of these biases were statistically removed. The authors conclude that researchers can generally trust in the veridicality of anonymous self-report data about commonplace aspects of marriage.

The present study evaluated the use of a sliding-fee scale at a training clinic for doctoral students in clinical psychology. A chart review of 209 individual therapy clients and a follow-up telephone interview of 87 of these clients were conducted. Results of the chart review revealed a client group of relatively low income, with only a very small number receiving social assistance or a disability pension. The follow-up survey found that the large majority of clients were satisfied with the fees charged. Service use (i.e., frequency and number of sessions), client satisfaction with services, and treatment outcome did not vary with out-of-pocket costs incurred by clients. Overall, findings suggest that training clinics can charge fees without affecting services, although future research needs to examine the extent that fee charging by training clinics may be an obstacle to service access for the poorest segments of the population.

In the past two decades there has been a dramatic increase in research on marital quality both as a construct in its own right and as a dependent variable in models of marital functioning. An important prerequisite for any empirical investigation of marital quality is the availability of a valid indicator of the construct of interest; thus, much attention has been paid to the delineation of the components of marital quality and to the development of appropriate and sensitive measures of these components (cf. Sabatelli, 1988). Unfortunately, researchers have as yet been unable to operationalize the construct in a manner that is both unambiguous and widely accepted. Marital quality has been defined as both a unidimensional and a multidimensional construct (Glenn, 1990; Norton, 1983). The unidimensional approach focuses on the global subjective evaluation of the relationship, usually through indices of general marital satisfaction (Fincham & Bradbury, 1987; Norton, 1983). The multidimensional approach combines information from various domains of marital life, such as intimacy, communication, sexuality, and conflict resolution. This approach is perhaps best typified by Spanier's (1976) work on the construct of marital adjustment and the development of the Dyadic Adjustment Scale (DAS). Although the DAS is the most commonly used self-report measure of marital adjustment (Glenn, 1990), numerous criticisms have been raised over the years about Spanier's definition of marital adjustment and about the DAS. These include conceptual arguments about the appropriateness of defining marital quality as a multidimensional construct and measurement concerns about item scaling and subscale weighting (Fincham & Bradbury, 1987; Norton, 1983; Sabatelli, 1988). Despite these criticisms, the DAS has been used in hundreds of studies of marital functioning and marital therapy (Spanier, 1985). Although cognizant of the relevance of the criticisms we outlined above, in this article we examine a different type of recurrent criticism of the DAS, namely its length. As a result of its apparent success, many researchers have suggested ways of assessing dyadic adjustment with shortened versions of the DAS. The 32-item measure is relatively short, but it has been argued that a shorter scale assessing dyadic adjustment would be invaluable for family researchers and practitioners engaged in survey research, clinical screening, evaluation of change in marital adjustment over the course of an intervention, and any other activity in which the time available for completing questionnaires is severely constrained (Schumm et al., 1985; Schumm et al., 1986; Sharpley & Cross, 1982). At present, there are various short form versions of the DAS that have been used or suggested for use in the research literature. For example, based on their discriminant function analysis and factor analysis of DAS reports from 95 married individuals, Sharpley and Cross (1982) proposed that both a one-item (item 31) and a six-item (items 8, 10, 11, 25, 27, and 28) version could adequately replace the full DAS. Subsequently, using data from 545 people currently or recently in dyadic relationships, Sharpley and Rogers (1984) provided some evidence for the utility of a seven-item shortened DAS that combined the single. item and the six-item options. Based on data obtained from 39 couples who met through a dating agency and 162 randomly selected married individuals, Goodwin (1992) recently reported results to support the utility of the single-item approach proposed by Sharpley and Cross (1982). The single-item version (Clark, Worthington, & Danser, 1988), the six-item version (Hansen, 1987), and the seven-item version (Hansen, 1985; Martin, 1985) have all been used by researchers as substitutes for the full DAS. Finally, based on confirmatory factor analytic results of data from 538 married couples and 197 cohabiting homosexual couples, Kurdek (1992) proposed that the Satisfaction subscale (items 16 to 23 and items 31 and 32) could replace the full DAS with little loss of information. …