Fate or Schema Chemistry? Which one does bring and hold mates together?

Year 2020, Volume: 9 Issue: 11, 17 - 42, 30.12.2020

Serdar Körük Nilüfer Özabacı

Abstract

The aim of this research is to analyze marital adjustment within the scope of Schema Theory and early maladaptive schema domains. The study group consisted of 77 married Turkish couples. In the data collection process which was conducted as online survey, the willing spouses were asked to use a pseudonym and they used the same pseudonym in their scales. Thus, they could be included in the analysis as husband and wife. Marital adjustment and early maladaptive schema domains of the participants were measured with scales. In the data analysis, firstly, the descriptive statistics of schema domains were conducted. Then, the correlations between schema domains and marital adjustment were analyzed. Afterwards, the participants were divided into two groups as high group and low group for each schema domain according to their level of having related schema domain and each group’s marital adjustment mean scores were examined. Lastly, the spouses were divided into two groups as high group and low group according to their dyadic marital adjustment mean scores, and the dyadic schema domain distributions of the spouses in each group were examined. Findings revealed that impaired autonomy, disconnection, and other-directedness schema domains had negative correlation with marital adjustment and participants having low level of schema domains had more marital adjustment scores. Dyadic schema domain distribution of spouses showed that there were repetitive schema domain matches among spouses in both high-adjusted group and low-adjusted group which can be interpreted that schema chemistry can have an effect on dyadic marital adjustment.

Keywords

Early maladaptive schemas, marital adjustment, schema chemistry

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