Abstract
Using a longitudinal dataset of 117 married couples without children spanning the first three years of marriage, we investigated trajectories of sexual satisfaction for both spouses using a novel Dyadic Latent Growth Model approach that distinguishes the communal sexual experience and the systematic differences in experience between partners. It also recognizes that there may be systematic variation in trajectories over couples. We showed how this approach can be used to predict couple-level sexual experience from couple-level marital satisfaction shortly after marriage. Partners’ sexual satisfaction was well represented at the dyadic level; there was a dyad-level decline in sexual satisfaction over the first three years of marriage, but also systematic variation around that average pattern. Level of dyadic marital satisfaction at Time 1 predicted the level of sexual satisfaction over three years, but not the systematic variation in the slope. Intra-dyad contrast of marital satisfaction at Time 1 predicted analogous contrasts of sexual satisfaction, but the strength of this association diminished over time. We discuss theoretical benefits of considering partners as couples rather than individuals.
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Notes
As Iida et al. (2018) discuss, the DSM is related to a model called the Common Fate Model (CFM) (Galovan et al., 2017) in that both represent the dyadic commonality. However, the CFM does not model systematic differences between partners, as does the DSM. For this reason, we do not consider the CFM here.
To rescale the items measured from 1–7 and 1–6 to a scale of 0–6 and 0–5, respectively, we subtracted the minimum scale score (1) from participants’ scores. Rescaling of this variable is a linear transformation and did not affect the subsequent statistical tests (Cohen et al., 2013).
Generally, means were significantly larger for both husbands and wives when the full 25-item ISS was used (p < .001). A majority of the items that reflected sexual problems did not load onto the sexual enjoyment factor. Because participants typically do not endorse these items and because they are reverse-scored, scores for these items were at the ceiling of the scale (i.e., 7) and inflated the means of the full 25-item ISS. The estimates from and fit of trajectory Model 3 described below did not differ substantially when the full 25-item ISS was used or the refined 15-item sexual enjoyment factor. This alternative model is reported in online appendix (https://osf.io/j26qx/).
The magnitude of the correlations did not seem to be affected by attrition. When compared to correlations based on the listwise deletion N = 70, the median difference was -.01.
In online appendix (https://osf.io/j26qx/), we provide the MPlus syntax and output for these analyses.
We compared Model 2 with an alternative trajectory in which the third time-point of data was indicated as the intercept of the model instead of the second time-point. The fit of both models is identical, and the difference between time-points 1 and 2 was identical in both models (2.598). Results from the alternative Model 2 are provided in the online appendix: https://osf.io/j26qx/
An alternative Model 3 with a linear slope was run but yielded worse fit than the nonlinear trajectory of the reported Model 3. The estimates did not differ substantially. We include this alternative model in the online appendix: https://osf.io/j26qx/
A similar LGM with structured residuals was reported by Curran et al. (2014). One key difference between the two models is that the authors specify a causal association between residual components, whereas we allow the model to estimate the association between residual components. In this way, our approach is agnostic with regard to the directionality of the associations. However, both models are comparable and produce virtually identical results.
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This work was supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation (BCS0921896) awarded to the second author. Any opinion, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.
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The Austin Marriage Project was originally approved as expedited in accordance with Federal Regulations by the Institutional Review Board at the University of Texas at Austin (Protocol #2009-06-0015). Data analyses and handling were exempt from ethical review as determined by the Institutional Review Board at New York University (FY2017-389).
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Ghodse-Elahi, Y., Neff, L.A. & Shrout, P.E. Modeling Dyadic Trajectories: Longitudinal Changes in Sexual Satisfaction for Newlywed Couples. Arch Sex Behav 50, 3651–3662 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-021-02075-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-021-02075-9