Abstract

The present study were to examine marriage couple's reciprocity of self-esteem, communication patterns, conflict coping behaviors, and marital satisfaction, and to examine the effects of self-esteem, communication patterns, conflict coping behaviors on their marital satisfaction. According to Kenny's Actor and Partner Interdependence Model(APIM, 1996), there are two effects in dyadic data. One of them is actor effect(the impact a persons aspect or behavior has on his or her own outcome) and another is partner effect(the impact a persons aspect or behavior has on his or her partner's outcome). We did separately calculate two effects from 120 marriage couples' data. Participants were given a series of questionnaires to examine each of couple's self-esteem, communication patterns, conflict coping behaviors, and marital satisfaction. The first major result is that there was no or weak evidence in the reciprocity of the couples' self-esteem and conflict coping behavior, but couples' reciprocity in the communication patterns and marital satisfaction were very high. Second, husband's and wife's self-esteem affected not only self's but also spouse's marital satisfaction. Also, husband's and wife's constructive communication, criticism, and escaping communication affected not only on self's but also on spouse's marital satisfaction. Over all, effect size of actor is bigger than that of partner effect on almost measures. Lastly, among uses of conflict coping behaviors, frequency of husband's and wife's conflict ignoring behavior affected negatively on both self's and spouse's marital satisfaction. Especially husbands' emotion expression behavior affected negatively on wife's satisfaction, but wife's conflict ignoring behavior affected negatively on husbands' satisfaction. Those findings suggest that marriage couple's conflict coping behaviors affect on partner's satisfaction asymmetrically.