ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the development of the Specific Affect Coding System (SPAFF), provides a brief overview of the coding system, and discuss the psychometric properties of the scale. The SPAFF Coding System was developed to evaluate the emotional content of couples' problem-solving interactions. The marital research of Gottman and his colleagues established the validity of the SPAFF Coding System for predicting both marital quality and stability. Gottman and his colleagues describes those studies using realtime versions of the SPAFF coding system includes Longitudinal Study of Married Couples, Meta-Emotion Structure of Families, Newlywed Marriages, Abusive Marriages, and Seattle 1998 Study of Marriages. The SPAFF Coding System could be applied to other relationship contexts such as cohabiting couples and couples contemplating marriage. More specifically, it will be important to test whether the SPAFF Coding System has the same measurement and predictive power for couples of diverse racial and ethnic heritage.
