College Students' Chronological Age Predicts Marital Happiness Regardless of Length of Marriage.

A revised version of the Quality Marriage Index (QMI) was used to examine demographic correlates of marital satisfaction. We administered the revised QMI to a sample of college students and found a significant positive correlation between age and relationship satisfaction. We suggest that this increase in relationship satisfaction could be due to age related increases in life satisfaction and age related increases in conscientiousness and decreases in neuroticism. ********** Nazarina & Schumm (2009) demonstrated that a shorted form of Norton's Quality Marriage Index (1983) was simple to administer and has sound reliability and validity. Given the convenience of this scale, we administered the revised Quality Marriage Index (QMI) to measure relationship satisfaction in married and cohabitating college students and to determine whether relationship satisfaction is related to demographic characteristics of this population. Method Participants Participants included sixty-nine undergraduate and graduate students enrolled at a 6,000 student university in Oklahoma of whom 49 were female and 20 were male. Participants included twenty-five freshman, twelve sophomores, three juniors, ten seniors, and nineteen graduate students. The sample consisted of Caucasians (30), African-Americans (15), Multiracials (13), Hispanics (6), Native-Americans (3), Asian-Americans (2) and 3 subjects did not indicate their ethnicity. Participants ranged in age from 18 to 54 years, M = 27.01. Materials Demographic information was collected using a self-report questionnaire. Information collected included gender, ethnicity, college major, years in school, religious affiliation, and self-reported religiosity. Participants also reported whether they were married or cohabitating, how many years they had lived together and the number of children that they had. A revised version of the Quality of Marriage Index (QMI) (Norton, 1983) was used to assess relationship satisfaction that has been reported to have sound psychometric properties (Nazarinia & Schumm, 2009). For this study we changed the word marriage in item 1 to relationship so as to include people in romantic relationships in general. The original QMI has solid psychometric properties, with reported internal reliabilities ranging from .89 to .99 (Knee, Patrick, Victor, Nanayakkara, & Neighbors, 2002; Neff & Kareny, 2004; Paleari, Regalia, & Fincham, 2005). The scale has demonstrated concurrent validity with the Kansas Marital Satisfaction Scale (Calahan, 1997), which is another widely used measure of global satisfaction. The QMI has been used with married couples (Neff & Karney, 2004), including newlyweds (Palerari et al., 2005) and couples in medium and long term marriages (Paleari et al., 2005). It has also been used with engaged couples (Stafford & Canary, 1991), cohabitating couples (Kalbfleisch, 2001), and dating couples (Kabfleisch, 2001; Stafford & Canary, 1991). Nazarinia and Schumm (2009) reported psychometric properties for the revised version of the QMI. They report high internal consistency, with substantial test-retest reliability. The revised QMI has been used with undergraduate students in heterosexual, non-married (dating) relationships (Knee, et al., 2002) and with expectant and new Canadian mothers (Nazarina & Schumm, 2009). Design and Procedure Participants were instructed by a research assistant to read and sign an informed consent document which briefly outlined the nature of the study, the risks and benefits of participation in the study, and a statement of confidentiality. All participants filled out the forms in a group setting. The participants then filled out a short demographics questionnaire and the revised QMI. All of the participants completed the surveys voluntarily, were debriefed as to the nature of the study and were given extra credit in one college course by the relevant course instructor. …