A Comment on Schram's Paper on Marital Satisfaction over the Family Life Cycle

The article by Rosalyn Weinman Schram entitled Marital Satisfaction Over the Family Life Cycle: A Critique and Proposal (February, 1979) contains some good ideas and makes some valid points, but it is seriously flawed by misrepresentations of the cited literature. Although the paper is characterized by a general carelessness in its treatment of the related literature, I confess to being mainly concerned about its treatment of a paper of mine (Glenn, 1975). As the title of Schram's paper indicates, it deals with satisfaction, and she begins her critique of the related literature with the following statement: All of the researchers addressed themselves to the central question: how is the family life stage related to one's perception of satisfaction? I was dismayed, therefore, to find, four lines later, that one of the studies referred to is a study of mine which does not deal with satisfaction, except for some incidental comments and reports of data on marital happiness in three paragraphs toward the end of the paper-a portion of the paper never mentioned by Schram in her several references to the study. The dependent variable in my study, as the title of the paper clearly indicates, is the general or global psychological well-being of women rather than satisfaction. This inaccurate characterization of my study is a serious blunder because Schram's first criticism of

Carelessness · Criticism · Economics · Family life · Happiness · Life satisfaction · Perception · Political science · Positive economics · Sociology · Statement (logic · Gender Studies · Law · Psychological Well-being and Life Satisfaction · Psychology · Social Psychology