Compliance-Gaining in Marital Interaction

Abstract

This article focuses on how the communication behaviors of married couples correspond with the individual spouse's likelihood of gaining compliance and his or her contentment with the relationship. A sieve-coding scheme was developed to categorize the 30-minute interactions of a randomly selected sample of 51 married couples who participated in two role plays of a relational conflict. Analyses of their conversations revealed that (1) husbands' compliance-gaining behavior is more often predictably related to who wins the dispute, although wives win more frequently; (2) compliance-gaining attempts by either party show a negative association with long-term relational states; and (3) husband and wife frequency of use of individual compliance-gaining strategies is correlated for most strategies.