Abstract
This study investigated middle-aged married couples' attitudes toward communication with their partners, and analyzed the relationship between communication attitudes and demographic variables (educational background and income level). Participants were 277 pairs of married couples who ware parents in nuclear families. The main results were as follows. (1) Factor analysis of communication attitude extracted four factors, "high-and-mighty", "sympathetic", "dependent/friendly", and "ignoring/avoiding". (2) Husbands' attitudes were significantly higher than wives' on 2 negative dimensions ("high-and-mighty" and "ignoring/avoiding"), while wives' attitudes were higher than husbands' on 2 positive dimensions ("sympathetic" and "dependent/friendly"). (3) Husband' attitudes were characterized primarily on the "high-and-mighty" dimension, whereas wives' were strongest on "dependent/friendly". (4) Educational background was found to have no significant association with communication attitudes to their partner. Finally, wives' income level was significantly related to husbands' "sympathetic" attitude, i.e., the higher the wives' income level the more sympathetic husbands were toward them.
