Addressing Empirical Discrepancies in the Transition to Parenthood Literature

• Main Author: Hatton, Holly Nichole
• Format: Dissertation
• Language: English
• Published: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses 01.01.2012
• Subjects: Behavioral psychology; Clinical psychology; Individual & family studies
• ISBN: 1267657553; 9781267657558

While there are many research articles in the transition to parenthood about the effects of the transition to parenthood on marital well-being, researchers continue to disagree as to whether the association represents a true causal effect. Methodological limitations of previous work have limited our understanding of how having a child impacts marital functioning. The central motivation for this study is to address the conflicting findings and the lack of consensus concerning how having a child impacts marital functioning. I address discrepancies in the literature using methodological variations to illustrate the shortcomings of previous work and then introduce a casual inference approach to address these limitations. Additionally, using the Vulnerability-Stress-Adaptation (VSA) model, I examine the impact of the transition to parenthood on marital functioning, behaviors, and satisfaction by comparing a matched sample of parent and non-parent husbands and wives. Results obtained from conventional analyses are also compared with an extension of propensity score matching (PSM)—risk-set matching—with latent differences score (LDS) modeling. Risk-set matching was used to isolate the effects of having a child on marital functioning, thereby removing confounding effects and providing a more stringent test of causality. This study answers a prominent question in the literature and demonstrates a lack of differential effects in the changes of relationship quality and functioning between parent and non-parent couples. Controlling the selection-bias between the parent and non-parent husbands and wives by using propensity score matching provides robust findings. For both parent and non-parent couples, there were negative changes, small to medium in magnitude, in various relationship behaviors and functioning.