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Blue-Collar and White-Collar Marital Interaction and Communication Orientation

University of Wisconsin—Madison

John M. Gottman

University of Washington

Anup K. Roy

University of Illinois at Urbana—Champaign

In light of a literature review identifying severe difficulties of interpretation attaching to previous prominent work on blue-collar marriages and on unhappy marriages, the present paper advances some new approaches to these relationships. The study assessed the effects of marital happiness (happy, unhappy), occupational status (blue-collar, white-collar), and communication orientation (high, low), on the frequency of negative affect and negative affect reciprocity during problem-solving in the home, without any observers present. The results indicated that the overall frequency of negative affect was influenced by marital happiness for both husbands and wives, occupational status for husbands, and the interaction of marital happiness with occupational status for wives; negative affect reciprocity was influenced only by marital happiness and not occupational status; and the empirical relationship between negative affect reciprocity and marital happiness was stronger for high communication oriented couples than low communication oriented couples. Implications of the above findings for the generality of current taxonomies of marital interaction and theories about blue-collar marriages are discussed.

Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, Vol. 5, No. 2, 201-221 (1988)
DOI: 10.1177/026540758800500205


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