Perceived Similarity and Understanding in Married Couples

Abstract

The propositional review of research on marital quality by Lewis & Spanier (1979) and the theoretical perspectives on close relationships of phenomenology, communication and consistency theory, suggest the hypothesis that the similarity perceived by a spouse is directly related to that spouse's understanding of his or her partner. The results of this study do not appear to confirm this suggestion. When global perception scores are divided by the importance of the issue in the relationship, it appears that issue salience is implicated in a couple's perceptual accuracy. In general, husband's perceived similarity is consistently closer to the actual level of dyadic agreement than is the wife's perceived similarity. Wife's understanding of her spouse is consistently more accurate than is husband's understanding. Only on low salience items is the wife's perceived similarity as accurate as the husband.