Married Couples' Responses to Disagreement

Inventory of Marital Conflicts (IMC): An Experimental Interaction Procedure

“…While the internal consistency (split half) reliability of the win score should be assessed before scores are used in substantive research, this was not reported in any of the major studies of family power which used win scores. The only study in which the reliability of the win scores were reported was the Color Matching Test (Ryder and Goodrich, 1966) and they found the win score to be very unreliable (r = .12). In order to assess the split half reliability of the IMC win scores, the 18 items of the test were split into two equivalent halves on the dimensions of number of disagreements, relevancy, and rank order.…”

“…The newly developed IMC coding system enables one to obtain a sequential record of the husband-wife interaction. This system bears some relationship to those used by Bales (1950) in the Interaction Process Analysis (IPA) and by Ryder and Goodrich (1966) in the Color Matching Test (CMT). Briefly, the IMC coding system consists of five information categories, six opinion categories, two suggestion categories, four positive and four negative supportive categories, and eight structural categories.…”

Affect and Status Dimensions of Marital Adjustment

“…These have included individual personality characteristics (Burgess and Wallin, 1953;Corsini, 1956), patterns of dominance and affection (Kotlar, 1965;Luckey, 1964) and role expectations (Hobart and Klausner, 1959;Stuckert, 1963). A smaller number of studies have used the more objective methodology of behavioral ratings (Kenkel, 1957;Ryder and Goodrich, 1966;Bauman and Roman, 1966;Barry, 1968). A number of theoretical systems have been applied to the interactions of happily and unhappily married couples occurring in a number of experimental situations.…”

Toward a theory of minimally rational argument: Analyses of episode‐specific effects of argument structures

“…Third, and in support of the point above, in the data analyzed in the first study, developed arguments, undeveloped arguments, and the total all correlated negatively with the competence and communication satisfaction measures. Fourth, marital conflict research has found that longer discussions about the topic of disagreement are negatively associated with relational satisfaction (e.g., Ryder & Goodrich, 1966). Finally, we do not know whether highly argumentative people (vs. others) talk longer regardless of their proclivity to engage more in argument, and we know of no research that has examined this hypothesis (despite its intuitive appeal).…”

“…First, research in marital interaction indicates that couples' argument: behavior affects and/or reflects their relationships, although conflict and argument are not isomorphic behaviors (Canary & Sillars, 1992). For example, satisfied (vs. dissatisfied) couples have been more likely to (a) discuss areas of disagreement instead of avoiding them (Gottman, 1979); (b) focus on the conversational task and use rational dialogue instead of spousal criticism (Krueger, 1983;Ryder & Goodrich, 1966); (c) be verbally responsive to the partner's comments (Koren, Carlton, & Shaw, 1980); and (d) engage in fewer reciprocations of negative affect, such as attack-defend patterns and countercomplaints (Alberts, 1988;Gottman, 1979;Ting-Toomey, 1983).…”