COMMITMENT -- OVERLOOKED VARIABLE iN MARITAL ADJUSTMENT?

The article discusses various issues related to the marital adjustment. Marital adjustment studies typically account for only a small part of the variance. New explanatory variables should be sought. Commitment for example, has not been considered in any of the published research. For this study, a Bogardus-type scale of commitment to one's marriage was constructed and included in a study of romanticism and marital adjustment. The sample consisted of 109 married pairs, randomly selected from a population of married university students. The correlation coefficient of commitment and marital adjustment was .32. This study, then, represents an attempt to help account for those succeeding in marriage that shouldn't or those failing to succeed when they should according to marriage prediction scores. This pilot study indicates that a heretofore-unused variable, commitment, has a high correlation coefficient with marital adjustment as the traditional variables do, and therefore gives at least limited promise for future research. Nevertheless, as mentioned above, the relationship between marital adjustment and commitment found in this study are as large as the relationships with other variables typically found to be related to marital adjustment. Hopefully, this article may call attention to dynamic interactive relationships and stimulate the discovery of new variables which can be added to the customary "static" or "past tense" variables such as education, parents' marital happiness, etc. to increase the predictive power of measuring instruments.