outcomes have typically not been studied together. The present investigation found the

marital relationship was more related to role arrangements than were the individual

partners' welfare. Future research should further explore the interplay between marital

and individual welfare in an effort to provide a more complete explanation of the marital

dissatisfaction and individual dysphoria ("baby blues") common among new parents.

Previous research has also found a link between increased conflict across the transition to

parenthood and marital dissatisfaction (Cowan et al., 1985). Marital processes present

before the birth of the couple's child were not assessed in the current study, and therefore

conclusions cannot be drawn as to whether the couples in this sample experienced an

increase in conflict when they became parents. However, for this sample, one predictor of

their marital quality after the birth of their child was the extent to which they rated the

hostile couple conflict type as characteristic of their conflict patterns. Future studies

could explore whether all increases in conflict predict decreased marital satisfaction, or if

this pattern only holds true for increases in negative (hostile) conflict.

 More research on men's violated expectations is clearly needed. Researchers are

only beginning to study violated expectations among new fathers (e.g., Pancer & Pratt,

2000; Strazdins et al., 1997; Van Egeren, 2004). The current study's variables explained

relatively little of the variance in husbands' violated expectations scores. Although the

husbands' mean violated expectations score indicated a somewhat greater magnitude of

violated expectations than the wives', their score was not associated with either

household or child-related task differentiation. Men's score on the volatile couple conflict

type scale accounted for some of the variance in their violated expectations; additional

research would be helpful in explaining this finding.