The Comparison of women's Life Story with High and Low Marital Satisfaction

Document Type : qualitative and quantitative studies

Authors

1 M. A. Student of Psychology, Psychology Department, Yazd University, Yazd, Iran

2 Assistant Professor of Counseling, Psychology Department, Yazd University, Yazd, Iran

3 Associate professor of Counseling, Psychology Department, Yazd University, Yazd, Iran

Abstract

Marital satisfaction is one of the most important variables on which a lot of researches have been performed in the field of family studies. The aim of this study is to compare the themes of life stories in two groups of women with high and low marital satisfaction. Therefore, the present study is a causal-comparative research using the method of narrative research which consists of the research community of all married women in Isfahan in 2021, who were selected by coastal sampling method of 20 women (10 of whom get the highest score and 10 of whom get the lowest score of marital satisfaction) and they have received a semi-structured interview of McAdams' Life Story (2001); the interviews are then coded and the Mann–Whitney U test is used to compare the narratives. The obtained results show that there is a difference between satisfied and dissatisfied women in terms of the number of themes of communion, redemption and contamination; so that the two themes of communion and redemption in the narratives of satisfied women are significantly higher and the number of themes of contamination in these individuals is significantly lower than the group of dissatisfied women. Also, there is no significant difference in the number of agency themes among the narratives of the two groups of women. According to the obtained results, it can be said that the satisfied and dissatisfied people have different experiences of marital life, which can be observed from the stories of these people about their lives.

Keywords


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