Predicting marital satisfaction on the basis of identitystyle, Tehran, Iran

ntroduction:Marital satisfaction affected mental and physical health, life satisfaction, career success, and so-cial communications, and is one the most important indices of life satisfaction. Among all the factors relating tothe marriage, the marital adjustment has a special place in the study of marriage and family relationships. Iden-tity development is conceptualized as a process beginning in adolescence and peaking in the early adulthoodperiod during which one explores and commits to possibilities in interpersonal relationship. During this time,young adults are determining the importance of parental, marital, and career life roles. The aim of this studywas to determine the relationship between identity styles with marital satisfaction and identification of predict-ing factors on marital satisfaction centers of city councils of Tehran, Iran.

This was a correlationalcross-sectional study. The population includes all couples referring to city councils in the 10th and 11th zones.Participants’ duration of marriage was between 1 and 10 years. In this study, a total of 200 couples were se-lected using convenience cluster sampling, and the questionnaires were given and distributed to them in healthhomes, cultural centers of Tehran municipal. Tools of study were Enrich marital satisfaction questionnaire andIdentity Style questionnaire. Questionnaires were collected and data were entered in SPSS software ver. 18 andanalyzed. Descriptive tests, Pearson correlation test, and Multivariate Regression Test were used for descriptionand analysis of data.

The mean age of samples in this study was 31.60 years old with standard deviationof 5.12 years (Ranged between 20- 44 years). Demographic data had normal distribution (P<0.05). One-wayANOVA analysis showed that there was significant relationship between the age of men and marital satisfaction(P= 0.01). Univariate Linear Model showed that there was no significant correlation between literacy (P=0.908)and occupation (P=0.629) with marital satisfaction. There was a significant relationship between marital satis-faction with normative and commitment styles (P<0.05) but there was no significant relation between this andinformative and diffuse/avoidant styles (P>0.05). Linear regression analysis showed that only commitment styleof identity can predict the marital satisfaction significantly.

We concluded that commitment stylecan predict the marital satisfaction, and normative and commitment styles are related with it.