Family Dynamics and Attitudes Toward Marriage

To examine our hypothesis that family experiences would be associated with attitudes toward marriage, we administered the Family Environment Scale (FES; Moos & Moos, 1986) and a Marriage Attitudes Questionnaire (MAQ; adapted from Long, 1987) to 40 unmarried college students. Correlational analyses indicated that for the conflict subscale of the FES, only two of the six marital expectation questions approached significance. However, family expressiveness (another subscale of the FES) was significantly correlated with three of the marital expectation questions and approached significance with a fourth question. These results indicated that higher expressiveness in the family was significantly related to positive attitudes toward marriage. We concluded that family dynamics need to be studied from multiple perspectives to identify factors that influence marital expectations.