The Relationship between Marital Adjustment and Relationship Standards

his research studied the relationship between marital adjustment and relationship standards (i.e., beliefs about how the relationship between two spouses should be). 50 female high school teachers and their husbands in Mashad district completed Baucom and Epstein’s Inventory of Specific Relationship Standards (ISRS) and the Spanier’s Dyadic Adjustment Scale (DAS). The correlation between the relationship-focused standards in the three major dimensions of marital functioning (boun- daries, power, and investment), and marital adjustment was significant. Also, satisfaction from meeting rela- tionship standards was significantly related to marital adjustment. The results suggested no significant corre- lation between emotional responses to unmet standards and marital adjustment. The relationship standards pre- dicted 25% of marital adjustment. The results of the stepwise regression technique showed that the expressive investment was the only standard that significantly predicted marital adjustment and accounted for 24.6% of variance of marital adjustment. Differences between spouse’s standards also were related to marital adjustment.