Effect of Parental Marital Discord on Adult Children

描述（由申请人提供）：处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是所有关系中固有的，但持续的、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，暴露于持续的父母冲突会对成年子女的不良关系产生影响，但由于缺乏纵向数据，关于长期影响的有效发现受到限制。拟议的研究将检验父母的榜样和冲突行为对儿童在亲密关系中管理和协商冲突的能力的影响，并在成年后保持快乐、稳定的关系。具体来说，这项研究将调查婚姻冲突是否会代代相传，方法是观察那些持续、高水平冲突和低婚姻质量的孩子成年后是否比那些父母离婚或保持低冲突婚姻的孩子更有可能拥有充满冲突、不幸福的关系。此外，我们将研究压力大的家庭环境在多大程度上通过早期的恋爱关系驱使年轻人离开父母的家庭，以及这些早期的关系是否不太可能持续下去。我们将利用最新的来自全国家庭和家庭调查（NSFH）的纵向、两代人的数据来改进以前的研究，揭示父母冲突影响儿童在成年后进入恋爱关系时解决冲突的能力和风格的机制。因此，拟议的研究旨在通过检查更广泛的父母关系，超越离婚与完整家庭的二分法，以及通过检查早期和后期成年子女关系结果以及这些结果中的性别差异，扩展先前关于离婚和不和的代际传递的研究。

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.