New Wine from Old Wineskins: Marital Power Research.

Methodological sophistication and conceptual complexity in the area of marital power has resulted in more questions than answers. The greatest danger of such a situation is a cessation of research motivated by fear of added mistakes, and supposedly justified by the lack of better measures and conceptualizations. Two particular stumbling blocks have been annoying differences between husbands' and wives' perceptions and low correlations between different measures of marital power. This study addresses both of these issues in two ways: (1) it reexamines some of our theoretical assumptions and empirical expectations; (2) it presents data which illustrate the advantages of utilizing measures which tap nontarget as well as targets concepts. In short, this paper should be viewed as one example of extracting new information from old and imperfect instruments. (Author)