Relationship Quality and Shared Activity in Marital and Cohabiting Dyads in the National Social Life, Health, and Aging Project, Wave 2

Abstract

OBJECTIVES: This paper introduces scales on shared activity and relationship quality for married and partnered older adults using multiple indicators from the second wave of National Social Life, Health, and Aging Project. METHOD: We assessed the reliability of the scales using Cronbach's alpha and the item-total correlation. We conducted exploratory factor analysis to explore the structure of the items and compared the distribution of each scale means by age group and gender. RESULTS: We found that the relational quality scale has a 2-factor structure, including a positive and negative dimension. The shared activity scale has a 1-factor structure. We found that partnered men show both higher positive and higher negative relationship quality than do partnered women, suggesting that more older men than women experience ambivalent feelings toward their spouse or partner and more women than men have relationships of indifferent quality, with relatively low costs and relatively low benefits. DISCUSSION: The separate conceptualization of shared activity and relationship quality provides one way to examine the dynamic nature of marital quality in later life such as the extent to which shared activities among couples promote or detract from relationships' quality. Analyses for individuals and for dyads are discussed.

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