Marital Agreement as a Function of Status-Related Agreement

This paper investigates whether the relatively great agreement of higher-status spouses is based upon their style of marital interaction or upon status-related characteristics of the spouses as individuals. Data are from a sample of 96 Eastern Kentucky married couples, with spouses interviewed separately on their attitudes toward shelters from radio-active fallout. Consistent with research by Bott and by Rainwater on conjugal role relationships, social status of the couple and degree of marital agreement were found to be directly related; however, agreement between artificially paired males and females was also related to social status. Thus the results suggest that the attitudinal agreement characteristic of the joint conjugal role relationship may derive simply from spouses' high social status rather than from style of marital interaction. This paper focuses upon the generalization by Bott (1959:53-58) and by Rainwater (1965: 29-33) that couples with higher social status are more likely to have "shared interests." Rainwater found that the "joint" conjugal role relationship-which includes shared interestsis characteristic of upper-middle class couples. Conversely, he found that the "segregated" conjugal role relationship-spouses having separate interests-characterizes a majority of couples in the lower-lower class. These results are generally consistent with those of Blood and Wolfe (1960), who found patterns of sharing in middle-class couples and apartheid in the working class. The term "shared interests" as defined by Bott and by Rainwater clearly includes mutual approval, or agreement in attitude. For example, Rainwater (1965:64-70) found that within "jointly organized" couples, husbands and wives shared an interest in having sex relations: both were either strongly or mildly positive. However, while most husbands of "segregated" couples were positive toward sex, their wives were likely to be negative toward the sex act. Although the basis for generally greater agreement within upper-status couples is not fully specified, both Bott and Rainwater seem to imply that the major cause lies in the type and frequency of interaction within the joint conjugal relationship: husband and wife join together in many activities with a minimum of task differentiation. But some research results indicate that marital interaction is not the major source of marital agreement. Yaukey et al. (1967) concluded that for their sample of couples from Dacca, East Pakistan, frequent husband-wife agreement on the topic of birth control was less due to intramarital communication than to individual characteristics of the spouses. However, the research did not determine whether communication was any more important to the agreement of higher-status couples than to the agreement of lower-status couples. Kirkpatrick and Hobart (1954:1114) found that over a range of topics central to marital adjustment, the agreement of married college students was less than one-third higher than the agreement between randomly matched male-female pairs of students. This paper investigates whether the relatively Revision of a paper presented at the annual meeting of the Pacific Sociological Association, Anaheim, California, April 1970. The paper is based upon a survey conducted by the author as part of a contract with the U.S. Office of Civil Defense, under the auspices of the Agricultural Experiment Station, University of Kentucky. I am grateful for help on this paper from the following faculty at the University of Arizona: Richard F. Curtis, Maynard L. Erickson, Robert C. Leonard, and Jerry L. L. Miller.