Ethnically Mixed Marriages through the Phenomenon of Marriage Satisfaction

The paper brings forward results of the empirical study of the phenomenon of marriage satisfaction in bi-ethnic and mono-ethnic officially married couples. The authors distinguish the following main characteristics of marriage satisfaction: personal, mutual, average for a married couple, characteristics according to spheres of marriage (household, sexual-erotic, leisure, psychotherapeutic, birth and upbringing of children, unanimity of views and judgments of relatives and friends), features of conflicts in bi-ethnic and mono-ethnic marriages. Methods of the study included (a) the analysis of the literature on the problem, (b) psycho-diagnostic method, (c) comparisons of respondent groups, and (d) methods of qualitative and quantitative and statistical analysis of the results. Methodological tools included the “Marriage Satisfaction” test by O. O. Eremicheva and L. Ia. Gozman (in the adaptation of A. I. Tashcheva) and A. I. Tashcheva's questionnaire for studying basic socio-demographic, socio-economic and other 19 characteristics of married couples. Partners of 30 officially married couples at the age from 25 to 35 (Russians, Armenians, Ossetians, Ukrainians, Belarusians, Georgians) took part in the empirical study. From the results obtained in the present investigation the following conclusions were made. First, if to compare with bi-ethnic couples, mono-ethnic couples had reliably higher marital satisfaction in whole. Second, mono-ethnic couples had reliably higher scores in characteristics according to spheres of marriage (household, sexual-erotic, leisure, psychotherapeutic, birth and upbringing of children, unanimity of views and judgments of relatives and friends). The findings are of direct practical relevance and can be useful in psychological centers when working with marrying and divorcing couples with a different ethnic composition for the initial diagnostics of the quality of relationship in marriage, prevention and psychological correction of destructive marital conflicts to optimize the quality of marital relationship as a basic means of productive positive implementation of the state population policy. This paper presents a part of a broader study entitled “Marital conflicts in bi- etnic couples at the age of early maturity” [7].