Not Shifting but Broadening Marital Research: Comments on Fincham, Stanley, and Beach

Has the time come to shift the focus of marital research? The strongest case for refocusing an area of research requires support for the arguments that: (a) the empirical and theoretical questions motivating the prior focus of the area have been largely answered and (b) progress in reaching some agreed-upon broad goal requires redirecting attention toward new questions. In the relatively short history of this field, research on marriage has already undergone several shifts of emphasis but these shifts have rarely been accompanied by support for these arguments. For example, the earliest marital research, typified by the prediction studies of Burgess (e.g., Burgess & Cottrell, 1939), Adams (1946), and Terman (1938), focused primarily on the characteristics of the spouses, suggesting that some people were more prone to having successful marriages than others. Beginning in the 1970s, interest in personal characteristics waned, but not because central questions regarding the role of enduring characteristics in marriage had been answered. Rather, rising divorce rates had led to an increased demand for treatments and marital therapies, prompting attention to aspects of marriage that might be changed during therapy, that is, communication and conflict resolution (e.g., Gottman, 1979; Raush, Barry, Hertel, & Swain, 1974). Behavior change remains a thorny problem for marital research, but by the late 1980s, the cognitive revolution and the ascendancy of attachment theory had shifted the focus of the field again, directing attention to unobservable processes within each spouse, that is, how spouses think about and understand each other (Bradbury & Fincham, 1990). As different sets of variables have risen to the forefront of marital research, the field has expanded to encompass an increasingly wide range of predictors. Yet marital research to date does not seem to be accumulating to inform an ever more refined and comprehensive model of how marriages succeed and fail. This is the context within which Fincham, Stanley, and Beach (2007), reviewing recent developments in marital research, propose that the time has come to shift the emphasis once again. The shift they describe appears to have two components. First, they suggest that marital research is moving from a nearly exclusive focus on distress, conflict, and problem solving toward a new focus on the sustaining and uplifting aspects of marriage (e.g., support, forgiveness, commitment). second, they suggest that models of marital development are moving from an assumption of gradual linear change over time to an acknowledgment that change in marriage can be sudden and nonlinear. To the extent that a continued emphasis on older questions has become limiting, the authors suggest that "recent empirical developments have created a new intellectual climate in which the study of transformative processes will assume center stage" (Fincham et al., 2007, p. 275). In these brief comments, I suggest that the call for a new shift in the focus of marital research may be premature. Recognizing the empirical developments that these authors have described, I nevertheless argue that the two conditions that would provide a strong case for a shift in focus have not been met, that is, the empirical questions driving research on conflict and problem solving are not close to being answered and the field has not agreed on an overarching goal requiring a new set of emphases. Instead of shifting the emphasis of this field to yet another set of new variables, I propose that progress in understanding marriage is likely to follow from new approaches to conducting marital research, even if that research largely addresses the same old variables. The potential value of recent empirical developments in marital research may be not to shift the focus of marital research but to broaden it, highlighting the interactions among all the domains of marital research that have been examined to date. …