ABSTRACT
Ted Huston, Susan McHale, and Ann Crouter (1986) were interested in changes in marital relationships during the early years of marriage. Their efforts spearheaded the PAIR Project (Process of Adaptation in Intimate Relationships) which resulted in a 13-year longitudinal study of courtship, marriage, and adaptation of 168 married couples and included four phases of data collection. To assess partners’ marital satisfaction, the authors developed the Marital Opinion Questionnaire (MOQ). This measure was adopted from Campbell, Converse, and Rogers’ (1976) measure of life satisfaction. The MOQ is a 10-item seven point semantic differential scale that is anchored in evaluative subjective qualities of marriage that include: (1) miserable-enjoyable, (2) rewarding-disappointing, (3) full-empty, (4) discouraging-hopeful, (5) interesting-boring, (6) doesn’t give me much chance-brings out the best in me, (7) lonely-friendly, (8) worthwhile-useless, (9) hard-easy, and (10) tied down-free. In addition, a single 7-point semantic differential question captures a holistic assessment of overall marital satisfaction and is bounded by two bipolar adjectives: completely satisfied to completely dissatisfied. Factor analysis revealed that the hardeasy and free-tied-down dimensions did not cluster with the other eight items and were therefore eliminated (Campbell et al., 1976). However, recent research has employed the two items without consequence (see Schrodt & Afifi, 2007; Vangelisti, Maguire, Alexander, & Clark, 2007).
