Exploring Couple Strategies in the Face of Marital Conflict: A Grounded Theory

The current research was done with the aim of developing an endemic model for marital conflicts using a grounded theory, as a common method in qualitative methods. The data were collected using semi-structured interviews with 40 married women and men who were recruited using purposive method. According to the grounded theory approach, the data were analyzed by dipping into the data, ongoing comparison, and encoding. According to the findings, the contributing factors for marital conflict are: disagreement, unmet needs, stressful situations, conflicting behaviors, dishonesty, spouse's mistakes, cyberspace, community attendance, communication with families-of-origin, and unfavorable economic conditions. In such situations, people adopt such strategies as dialogue, need identification, assistance, etiology, lack of warning, timing, understanding communicational needs, non-positioning, not shaming, etc. One can conclude that though occurrence of conflicts in marriages is unavoidable, the adopted strategies of the spouses in face with these disputing grounds might eliminate the effects of these conflicts and contribute to positive outcomes like increased intimacy, personality evolution, making opportunities, increased respect, etc.