n the Empty Nest article on page 1194, right-hand side: “Cross-sectional research has generally found that older couples whose children have left home report higher marital satisfaction than younger couples with children at home…. Cross-sectional designs have been criticized… for capitalizing on selection effects (i.e., unhappy couples tend to divorce; Schram, 1979).” What does this quote mean?Group of answer choicesParticipants self-selected into participating in the study, so it only captures the type of people who are willing to volunteer for the study.Unhappy couples tend to divorce, and then get remarried into more satisfying marriages. So overall marriage satisfaction can seem to improve with age even if individual marriages do not become more satisfying.
Question
n the Empty Nest article on page 1194, right-hand side: “Cross-sectional research has generally found that older couples whose children have left home report higher marital satisfaction than younger couples with children at home…. Cross-sectional designs have been criticized… for capitalizing on selection effects (i.e., unhappy couples tend to divorce; Schram, 1979).” What does this quote mean?Group of answer choicesParticipants self-selected into participating in the study, so it only captures the type of people who are willing to volunteer for the study.Unhappy couples tend to divorce, and then get remarried into more satisfying marriages. So overall marriage satisfaction can seem to improve with age even if individual marriages do not become more satisfying.
Solution
The quote is discussing the limitations of cross-sectional research designs in the context of studying marital satisfaction. It suggests that older couples whose children have left home generally report higher marital satisfaction than younger couples with children at home. However, this type of research design has been criticized for capitalizing on selection effects.
The selection effect mentioned here is that unhappy couples tend to divorce. This means that in a cross-sectional study, the older couples whose children have left home are more likely to be the ones who were happy and didn't divorce, while the unhappy ones are no longer part of the sample because they divorced. This could lead to an overestimation of marital satisfaction among older couples, as the sample is biased towards couples who stayed together, presumably because they were happier in their marriage.
So, the quote is not necessarily saying that marriage satisfaction improves with age, but rather that the apparent increase in satisfaction could be due to the way the sample is selected in these types of studies.
Similar Questions
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