Date

4-18-2025

Department

School of Behavioral Sciences

Degree

Doctor of Philosophy in Psychology (PhD)

Chair

Joyce B. Brady

Keywords

marriage, stress, religion, coping, christianity, couples

Disciplines

Psychology | Religion

Abstract

Marriage is the building block of society and as such is an important developmental stage. Unfortunately, studies suggest that stress could be harmful to marriages. However, many resilient factors have been found to protect marriages from stress such as good communication, secure attachments, gratitude and optimism, and religion. The Bible teaches that marriage was founded by God and is a sacred institution. Further, stress should be expected in life, is useful for learning and growth, and God will help his followers to cope with it. The current quantitative study sought to discover if viewing marriage as sacred and using positive religious coping methods are also resilient qualities for married couples. To study this, participants were recruited through Facebook advertising, flyers, and snowball sampling to fill out online surveys about stress, their beliefs about marriage as sacred, religious coping, and marital satisfaction. A regression analysis was conducted and the results indicated that stress was correlated with worse marital satisfaction as predicted, and sanctification of marriage was correlated with better marital satisfaction as predicted. However, positive religious coping was not found to influence marital satisfaction in opposition to what was predicted. The implications of this study suggest that stress can be harmful to marriage satisfaction, but sanctification of marriage is a possible resilient factor. Christian counselors may be able to use that information to help them develop new couples’ counseling techniques. Further, religious coping may or may not be a resilient factor, and future research could discover why this study contradicts previous works.

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