Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Birth-Order Complementarity And Marital Adjustment, Cornelia Vos

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

It was predicted that the level of complementarity of birth-order position is positively associated with marital adjustment. This hypothesis was developed from Adlerian (1959) theory about the effects of birth-order position on personality formation and from the Toman (1961) duplication theorem. The Spanier Dyadic Adjustment Scale (1976) was given to 327 married women. An analysis of variance revealed no significant differences between the various combinations of birth order (no data were available for the only-with-only combination due to insufficient number of subjects in this group). Correspondingly, level of complementarity of birth order was also found to be unassociated with marital …