This article focuses on how the communication behaviors of married couples correspond with the individual spouse's likelihood of gaining compliance and his or her contentment with the relationship. A sieve-coding scheme was developed to categorize the 30-minute interactions of a randomly selected sample of 51 married couples who participated in two role plays of a relational conflict. Analyses of their conversations revealed that (1) husbands' compliance-gaining behavior is more often predictably related to who wins the dispute, although wives win more frequently; (2) compliance-gaining attempts by either party show a negative association with long-term relational states; and (3) husband and wife frequency of use of individual compliance-gaining strategies is correlated for most strategies.
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