The Social Construction of Reality in Marriage;An Empirical Investigation

Abstract

A marriage is not a concrete reality that necessarily reveals itself to husband and wife in the same form. It is a history of actions and interactions, combined with mutual expectations based on that history and on broader cultural norms and values. It is therefore possible for the husband's and wife's perceptions of and reports about the marriage to differ. Using a national random telephone sample of 680 married couples, we test four hypotheses concerning the sources of disagreement in the husband's and wife's reports of decision making and housework: (1) The more dissimilar the sociodemographic backgrounds of husband and wife, the more dissimilar their reports; (2) The shorter the marriage, the more dissimilar their reports; (3) The fewer children they have, the more dissimilar their reports; (4) The extent and nature of dissimilarity in their reports depends on the nature of the objects of the reports. Our results support the fourth hypothesis but not the first three. We argue that differences appear to be due to the nature of the particular aspect of the marriage beging reported in combination with variations in preconceptions and with the contrasting positions of husband and wife in the marital relationship.