A comparison of intercultural marriages versus intracultural marriages in terms of adaptability and marital satisfaction

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to examine and compare the wife's level of adaptation and marital satisfaction of intercultural and intracultural marriages. The two main concepts under investigation were adaptation and marital satisfaction. There were a total of forty subjects whose ages ranged from thirty to sixty. The experimental group, wives of the intercultural marriages, consisted of twenty American females who were married to Turkish males and were residing in Turkey. The control group, or wives of the intracultural marriages, consisted of twenty Turkish females also married to Turkish males. Each group contained ten working and ten non-working women. Three measurement instruments were used in this study. An adaptation scale, developed for this study by the author, and Family Adaptability and Cohesion Evaluation Scale (Faces II) developed by Olson, Parter and Bell (1978), were used to measure the level of adaptability percieved by the wife. Semantic Differential Scale of Osgood (1967) and a second part of Faces II were used to measure the level of satisfaction also percieved by the wife. It was hypothesized that the level of adaptability percieved by the wife will bear a relationship to the degree of satisfaction she feels in her marriage, such that the better the level of adaptability the more satisfaction there will be in the marriage. It was also hypothesized that when the two types of marriages are compared, the American wives will show a lower level of adaptation and marital satisfaction when compared to the Turkish wives. The results indicate that there were no difference in the level of adaptability and satisfaction between intercultural and intracultural marriages. However the results showed that the higher the level of adaptation the higher the level of satisfaction. Thus the hypotheses were partially supported. The findings also showed a slight trend that the American females evaluated their marriages as more potent and the Turkish females showed a trend toward evaluating their marriages as more active. No difference was found between working and non-working females.