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很大的影响。尽管所有关系中都存在某种程度的冲突，但持久的、破坏性的冲突会产生真实而普遍的负面后果。虽然研究人员和夫妻治疗师假设，暴露在持续的父母冲突中会对成年子女产生不利的关系后果，但关于长期影响的有效发现受到缺乏纵向数据的限制。这项拟议的研究将考察父母模范和冲突行为对儿童在成年后管理和处理亲密关系中的冲突以及维持快乐、稳定的关系的能力的影响。具体地说，这项研究将调查婚姻冲突是否会在几代人之间传播，调查的方法是，与父母离婚或保持低冲突婚姻的儿童相比，处于持续和高水平冲突以及低婚姻质量的儿童是否更有可能在成年后拥有充满冲突的、不愉快的关系。此外，我们还将研究紧张的家庭环境在多大程度上通过早期的浪漫关系将年轻人从父母家中赶走，以及这些早期关系是否不太可能持久。我们将通过使用国家家庭和家庭调查(NSFH)新获得的纵向的、两代人的数据来改进以前的研究，以阐明暴露在父母冲突中对儿童成年后进入浪漫关系时的冲突解决能力和风格产生影响的机制。因此，这项拟议的研究旨在通过检查更广泛的父母关系，超越离婚和完整的家庭二分法，以及通过检查早期和晚期成年子女关系结果以及这些结果中的性别差异，来扩展先前关于离婚和不和谐的代际传播的研究。

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.