THE IMPACT OF DOWNWARD AND UPWARD SOCIAL COMPARISON ON THE PERCEIVED QUALITY OF MARITAL RELATIONSHIP SATISFACTION

Abstract

Social comparison theory is a theoretical orientation and over the years, an increasing amount of research has suggested that social comparison processes have positive as well as negative influences on the evaluation of the quality of marital relationship satisfaction. The main objective of current research was to explore the contrastive effects of comparison on the married individuals' relationship with their spouses. Another objective of the research was to find out the marital relationship of the people who are oriented to social comparison. The research was carried out into five parts. The first part of research was consisted of the development of the measure, Social Comparison in Marital Relal tionship Measure (N= 600). The non availability of an indigenous instrument to measure the impact of social comparison and its direction on marital relationship peculiar to Pakistani cultural context provided a rationale for the development of SCMRM Part II of this research comprised a validation study (N= 100). Index of Self Esteem and Satisfaction With Life Scale were used to determine convergent validity and Beck Depression Inventory was used to determine discriminant validity of SCMRM Part III of this research was conducted to translate Iowa Netherlands Comparison Orientation Measure into Urdu developed by Gibbons and Buunk (1999), to be used in the main part of the research. Part IV was undertaken to investigate the role of gender and its relations with social comparison in marital relationship. Finally, main study was conducted with (N =500) married individuals of diverse age, education, and socio economic status completed standardized measures of Dyadic Adjustment Scale, INCOM, and SCMRM. The relationship belvveen the direction of comparison and the orientation of comparison on the perceived quality of marital III relationships were assessed through a series of successful statistical analysis of Correlation, t test and One Way Analysis of Variance. Consistent with hypotheses, the research showed that married individuals evaluate their relationship positively when engaging in downward comparison in marital relationship as compared to those who engage in upward comparison. The more the people having social comparison orientation, the less satisfied they are in their marital relationship. The role of social comparison orientation as a moderator in the relationship between marital comparison and marital relationship satisfaction was also confirmed.