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Marital Satisfaction and Communication Patterns Among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Couples
by Maria Mohamed
Faculty Advisor: Hannah Williamson, PhD, Graduate Student Mentor: Megan Schouweiler
The way partners communicate is a strong indicator of the health of their relationship. Use of different pronouns (e.g., “we” vs. “you”) is an easily observable way to measure communication, and pronoun use has been strongly linked with relationship satisfaction, such that more use of “I” and “we” is associated with higher levels of relationship satisfaction, whereas more use of “you” is associated with lower levels of relationship satisfaction. However, this body of research has focused on middle-class White couples, so little is known about how culture and language play a role in these associations. I sought to address this gap by examining rates of pronoun use in culturally and linguistically diverse groups, focusing on 1) how use of “I”, “we”, and “you” pronouns differ between Hispanic-English speaking, Hispanic-Spanish speaking, and non-Hispanic newlywed couples (N = 398), and 2) whether use of these pronouns is related to marital satisfaction in the same way for each ethnolinguistic group. Results indicate that groups significantly differed from each other on mean levels of “I”, “you” and “we” use. Additionally, more use of “you” was significantly associated with lower levels of relationship satisfaction for Hispanic-English and Hispanic-Spanish speaking couples, and more use of “we” was significantly associated with higher levels of relationship satisfaction for husbands in Hispanic-English speaking couples. These results indicate that culture and language play a role in amount of pronoun use, and language plays a role in the association between pronoun use and relationship satisfaction. Overall, this study provides evidence that long-held beliefs about the ability of communication behaviors to indicate the health of the relationship may not be the same across different cultures and languages.