The impact of graduate and graduate professional education on the perceived marital adjustment of married students at a large urban university

Abstract

The purposes of this study were threefold: the first was to determine the effect that graduate and graduate professional education has upon the perceived marital adjustment of graduate students participating in programs at both the masters and doctoral levels, the second was to determine if there was any difference in the perceived marital adjustment of graduate students participating in graduate and graduate professional programs at both the masters and doctoral levels, and the third was to gather personal and demographic information on married and unmarried graduate students and the married students' spouses. The sample for this study was randomly selected from a population of over 5,000 graduate students who were enrolled in programs at all graduate levels at the central campus of a major urban university, the University of Houston, located in Houston, Texas. The total usable sample, representing 61.16 percent of the subjects contacted, for the personal and demographic analysis numbered 773, and the sub-samples identified as the experimental and control groups for the marital adjustment analyses totaled 336 and 82 respectively. Each subject was furnished with a four-part, self-administered questionnaire utilizing a contingency format. The first part classified the respondents and identified those additional sections requiring completion, the second collected personal and demographic information on the respondents and the married respondents' spouses, the third measured the married respondents' current state of marital adjustment, and the last retrospectively measured the previously married respondents' state of marital adjustment prior to starting their graduate programs. Parts three and four of the questionnaire, the sections designed to measure the married respondents' current and retrospective marital adjustment, were basically two identical versions of the Locke-Wallace Short Mari tai-Adjustment Test with the essential difference being the tense of the questions asked. The analysis of the personal and demographic data yielded information on the married and unmarried graduate students and the married students spouses that has generally been unavailable to date but is too voluminous to enumerate here. A retrospective pre-testing technique was first utilized to test the effect of graduate study on perceived marital adjustment and the data were evaluated using a t, test for the difference between two correlated means. The results were not significant; however, an attempt at validating this technique revealed that the retrospective evaluation of perceived marital adjustment was materially lower than the actual evaluation. Thus, it was apparent that the retrospective pre-test did not actually measure perceived marital adjustment prior to graduate study, but that past attitudes had been distorted into agreement with present ones. When the same question was explored using control and experimental groups and the data were evaluated using a t test for the difference between two independent means, significance was found at the .05 level. These data indicated that graduate education does have an effect on the perceived marital adjustment of graduate students, that the effect is deleterious, and that it is more apparent at the doctoral level than at the masters level. These results were supported when the differences in the effect of graduate education on the perceived marital adjustment of graduate students were evaluated with respect to degree level and type of degree sought. Using a t test for the difference between two independent means, significance was found at the .05 level. These data also indicated that graduate education at the doctoral level has a greater effect than at the masters level, that the effect is deleterious, and additionally that it is more discernable with that class of students described as graduate professional.