Effect of Parental Marital Discord on Adult Children

描述（由申请人提供）：管理人际冲突的能力对个人发展和人际关系有着巨大的影响。虽然某种程度的冲突在所有关系中都是固有的，但持续的破坏性冲突会产生真实的普遍的负面后果。虽然研究人员和夫妻治疗师假设，暴露于持续的父母冲突表现为对成年子女的不良关系后果，长期影响的有效研究结果受到缺乏纵向数据的限制。这项拟议的研究将研究父母的示范和冲突行为对儿童管理和协商亲密关系中的冲突以及在成年后保持快乐，稳定关系的能力的影响。具体来说，研究将调查婚姻冲突是否会跨代传播，方法是检查那些接触持续和高水平冲突和低婚姻质量的儿童是否更有可能在成年后发生冲突，不幸福的关系，然后是父母离婚或保持低冲突婚姻的儿童。此外，我们还将研究压力大的家庭环境在多大程度上促使年轻人通过早期参与浪漫关系而离开父母的家，以及这些早期关系是否不太可能持久。我们将通过使用来自全国家庭和家庭调查（NSFH）的新可用的纵向，两代数据来改进以前的研究，以揭示暴露于父母冲突影响儿童冲突解决能力和风格的机制，因为他们成年后进入浪漫关系。因此，拟议的研究旨在扩大以前的研究代际传递的离婚和不和谐的父母关系，超越离婚与完整的家庭二分法，以及通过检查早期和后期的成年子女的关系结果和性别差异，这些结果。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The ability to manage interpersonal conflict has a dramatic effect on individual development and personal relationships. Although some level of conflict is inherent in all relationships, persistent, destructive conflict has real and pervasive negative consequences. While researchers and couple therapists hypothesize that exposure to persistent parental conflict manifests itself in adverse relationship consequences for adult children, valid findings on the long-term effects have been constrained by a lack of longitudinal data. The proposed research will examine the influence of parental modeling and conflict behavior on children's ability to manage and negotiate conflict in close relationships and to maintain happy, stable relationships in adulthood. Specifically, the research will investigate whether marital conflict is transmitted across generations by examining if children who were exposed to continued and high levels of conflict and low marital quality are more likely to have conflict ridden, unhappy relationships as adults then children whose parents divorced or who remained in low conflict marriages. In addition, we will study the degree to which stressful family environments drive young adults from their parental homes through early engagement in romantic relationships and whether these early relationships are less likely to endure. We will improve upon previous research by using newly available longitudinal, bi-generational data from the National Survey of Families and Households (NSFH) to shed light on the mechanisms through which exposure to parental conflict influences children's conflict resolution abilities and styles as they enter romantic relationships as adults. Thus, the proposed research aims to extend previous research on the intergenerational transmission of divorce and discord by examining a broader range of parental relationships, beyond the divorced versus intact family dichotomy, as well as by examining both early and later adult child relational outcomes and sex differences in these outcomes.