The Relationship between Marital Commitment with Personality Traits

Commitment is one of the most important components of a successful marriage that without it, the marital commitment will be superficial, apparent and without direction. In this case, the couples are not able to experience the depth of love and intimacy which create because of loyalty, commitment, and marriage. The present study aimed to investigate the relationship between marital commitments and personality traits.

This study is a descriptive study of correlation. The study population consisted of all the married staff of welfare agencies in North Khorasan Province in 2013. The sample consisted 155 (67 males and 88 females) persons who were selected by multi-stage cluster sampling method. Data gathering was conducted by using standard questionnaires of Adams and Jonas Marital Commitment inventory (DCI) (1997) and McCrae & Costa personality Five-Factor Inventory (NEO-FFI) (1991). Data analysis was performed by SPSS v.18 software and using Pearson Correlation and linear regression methods.

Results showed that personality traits of extroversion, adaptability and responsibility have positive and significant relationship (0.217, 0.534 and 0.529 respectively), and personality trait of neuroticism and openness to experience have negative and significant relationship (-0.49 and -0.59 respectively) with marital commitment. Findings also showed that neuroticism, adaptability, openness to experience, responsibility and extroversion which explained changes of marital commitment by 0.24, 0.28, 0.34, 0.28 and 0.04, respectively, are significant at 0.99 confidences.

The findings showed that personality traits of persons are important factors in predicting their marital commitment. According to the findings, it is recommended that the role of personality factors as an affecting factor on the marital relationship can be investigated much more.