sense that couples who were less satisfied with their household/family and child-related

role arrangements would also be couples who had less agreement about their typical style

of resolving conflicts. Partners who do not have an accurate sense of how they approach

conflicts together, or who have differing preferences for how to approach conflict, are

likely to be less effective at producing satisfying outcomes from their negotiations,

including the negotiation of satisfying role arrangements. However, the role

dissatisfaction measure only explained 4.8% of the variance in the couple conflict type

discrepancy scores. It appears factors not included in this investigation are more strongly

related to this discrepancy.

 Gottman (1994) found couple conflict type "mismatches" to be highly predictive of

negative marital outcomes, such as dissatisfaction and destructive conflict patterns. He

hypothesized that the hostile couple conflict type may represent a couple's inability to

agree on one of the three regulated conflict types due to differing preferences. It is

therefore somewhat surprising that the couple conflict type discrepancy score calculated

for this investigation was not significantly associated with most of the study's variables.

However, the participants in this study were asked to rate how frequently their conflicts

matched those described in a depiction of each of the couple conflict types, not how they

would prefer their conflict interactions to be. Discrepancies were therefore based on

differences in partners' perceptions of their conflict interactions rather than differences in

their preferences. Future research assessing partners' preferences regarding the couple

conflict types in addition to their typical conflict interaction styles may be of more value.

Associations between Couple Conflict Types and the Couple-Level Variables

 A canonical correlation procedure was conducted to test the relationships between

the couple conflict types (volatile, conflict-avoiding, validating, and hostile) and the