Marital Adjustment and its Dimensions among Single-working couples and Dual-working Couples

Aim: Marriage is a way of life, in reality. It's not always sunshine and flowers, but for it to work, both sides need to be prepared to adapt. Most families are having a very hard time adjusting to the increasing number of families with two workers, especially when it comes to the marriage relationship. The present study aimed to examine the gender differences and correlation in marital adjustment and its dimensions among single-working couples and dual-working couples between 25 to 45 years of age range. It is a comparative study of marital adjustment of couples from urban and rural areas.

Methodology: A total of 400 couples from Lucknow city were studied including 200 single-working couples and 200 Dual-working Couples. The standardised tool of the Marital Adjustment Questionnaire developed by Kanchana Rohatgi and Pramod Kumar was used in the study. The data was statistically analysed by the SPSS 20 version that used the F test and Correlation Matrix.

Results: The findings of the study revealed that there is a significant gender difference in emotional, social and sexual dimensions of marital adjustment among single and dual-working couples. It also revealed that there is a significant correlation between emotional adjustment and social adjustment, sexual adjustment and emotional adjustment. It also revealed an interesting finding that dual-working couples have better marital adjustment than single-working couples and there is no such difference in marital adjustment of couples from rural and urban areas.

Conclusion: Better marital adjustment takes place with better emotional, social and sexual adjustment in married life. However, there is a negligible role of ethnicity in marital adjustment.