TITLE:
Perception of Parents as a Couple and Reported Current Marital Social Skills
AUTHORS:
Cílio Ziviani, Samuel Lins, Terezinha Feres-Carneiro, Andrea Seixas Magalhães, Renata Mello, Rebeca Machado
KEYWORDS:
Generational Psychic Transmission, Marital Social Skills, Ambivalence, Implicit Measures, Structural Equation Modeling
JOURNAL NAME:
Psychology,
Vol.5 No.18,
November
25,
2014
ABSTRACT: The goal
of this study is to verify the relationship between adult children’s perception
about their parents’ conjugality and these children’s conjugal skills today, as
married people. Participants in the study were 472 married Brazilians (217 men
and 255 women, M = 41.32 years old, SD = 12.78), with average time of marriage
of 14.41 years, SD = 14.95, who responded the self-reported instruments
Perception of Parents as a Couple Scale—PPCS and Marital Social
Skills Inventory— MSSI. To study the relation between instruments, first a
two-factor measurement model for the PPCS and a five-factor measurement model
for the MSSI were examined in confirmatory factor analyses. Then, the
hypothesized, theoretically derived structural model was tested, depicting path
coefficients estimates for regressions from factors of the PPCS onto factors of
the MSSI. The overall model presented satisfactory fit indices. Seven out of
ten structural path coefficient regression estimates were statistically
significant, as well as all item reflective regression estimates for both
instruments. Pairs of same-item opposite sign loadings, simultaneously
correlated to both PPCS factors were considered logical contradictories. The
explicit-implicit concept from cognitive psychology was chosen to account for
them, given the theoretically meaningful cross-loading of items between the
first factor (“explicit”) and the second one (“implicit”). This is interpreted
as indicative of psychological ambivalence in sons and daughters’ perception of
parents as a couple. It is concluded that, among a number of aspects the
perception of father and mother as a couple the PPCS accounts for, ambivalence
is the source of a major influence in current marital social skills.