The relationships of marital satisfaction, forgiveness, and religiosity

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationships between the variable marital adjustment, religiosity, and forgiveness.

Data was collected from a sample consisting of 170 married individuals. Participants were obtained by enlisting cooperation of community and religious groups in Southwest Virginia. The term marital adjustment was operationalized by Spanier's (1976) Dyadic Adjustment Scale (DAS) for the purposes of this study. Religiosity was operationalized by Rohrbaugh and Jessor's (1975) scale which utilizes four dimensions of religiosity: 1) ritual, 2) consequential, 3) ideological, and 4) experiential. The Enright Forgiveness Inventory (EFI} (Subkoviak, Enright, Wu, Gassin, Freedman, Olson & Sarinopoulos, 1992) was used to operationally define forgiveness.

Regression analysis was performed utilizing marital adjustment total score as the dependent variable and forgiveness total score as the independent variable. The relationship was found to be significant (t=2.36; p=0.021), thus confirming the basic premise that forgiveness would be significantly related to marital adjustment. as measured by the EFI and DAS respectively. There was no significant finding in the relationship between forgiveness and religiosity. Regression analysis indicated the relationship between marital adjustment and religiosity to be significant (t=2.12, p=.04). Religiosity was found to have a significant relationship with age (t=3.14. p=.002, R² =.05), yet neither forgiveness nor marital adjustment were found to have a significant relationship with age. Gender was not found to have a significant relationship with any of the three variables, A significant relationship was found between religious homogamy and religiosity (t=2.76, p=.01), yet neither forgiveness nor marital adjustment were found to have a significant relationship with religious homogamy. Attention to issues of forgiveness and religiosity in marital therapy appears to be indicated as they both are significantly related to marital adjustment.