Abstract

The purpose of present study was to identify the influence of marital communication patterns on marital satisfaction and the influence of conflict coping strategies on functional, dysfunctional marital communication patterns. For this purpose, marital satisfaction, couple communication pattern, emotion focused coping, problem focused coping and ego defense mechanism were measured. Major findings of this study were as follows: (1) Marital satisfaction was influenced by various demographic factors such as the number of children, education, marital durations, family size(for wives), and age. (2) Marital satisfaction positively related to constructive communication pattern, whereas negatively related to avoidant and demand-withdraw pattern. (3) In husbands, marital satisfaction was not influenced by the conflict coping strategies. Whereas in wives, marital satisfaction was influenced by emotion focused coping and ego defense mechanism. (4) In wives, anger control, passive-aggressive behavior influenced to constructive communication pattern and acting out, passive-aggressive behavior, compromise influenced to avoidant communication pattern. Wife demand-husband withdraw pattern was influenced to positive interpretation. (5) Finally, limitations and implications of the present study were discussed.