https://doi.org/10.24016/2020.v6n3.173
ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Marital satisfaction and impact of
confinement by COVID-19 pandemic in Mexico
Satisfacción marital e impacto del confinamiento por
COVID-19 en México
Lucía Quezada Berumen 1 *, René Landero Hernández 1
and Mónica Teresa González Ramírez 1
1 Faculty of
Psychology, Autonomous University of Nuevo León, Mexico.
* Correspondence: Monica Teresa González Ramírez. Faculty of Psychology, Autonomous University of Nuevo León. Dr. Carlos
Canseco 110, Col. Mitras Centro, CP 64460, Monterrey, NL, Mexico. Telephone: (81) 8333 - 8233. Email: monygzz77@yahoo.com
Received: July 23, 2020| Revised: September 19, 2020 | Accepted: September 26,
2020 | Published Online: September 27, 2020.
CITED AS:
Quezada
Berumen, L., Landero Hernández, R., & González Ramírez, M. (2020). Marital satisfaction and impact of
confinement due to COVID-19 in Mexico. Interacciones, 6 (3), e173.https://doi.org/10.24016/2020.v6n3.173
ABSTRACT
Background: The aim of the study was to evaluate
the relationship between marital satisfaction, measured by the Relationship
Assessment Scale and the perceived impact of confinement due to COVID-19 in
different areas of people’s lives, in a Mexican sample. Method: 101
people living as a couple, with an average age of 41.2 years (SD = 10.7), 54.5%
women and 45.5% men were evaluated. Results: The main result was a
negative and significant correlation that indicates that the greater the
satisfaction in the relationship, the less impact of confinement in the areas
of tranquility, happiness, health, physical condition and emotional well-being.
Conclusion: The people with higher marital satisfaction will perceive
less impact during the contingency by COVID-19 in the different areas of the
person's life.
Keywords: coronavirus,
couple, pandemic, quarantine, isolation, mental health.
RESUMEN
Introducción: El
propósito del estudio fue evaluar la relación entre la satisfacción marital,
medida por la Escala de Valoración de la Relación y el impacto percibido por el
confinamiento debido al COVID-19 en diferentes ámbitos de la vida de las
personas en una muestra mexicana. Método: Se evaluó a 101 personas que
viven en pareja, con edad promedio de 41.2 años (DE = 10.7), 54.5%
mujeres y 45.5% hombres. Resultados: El principal resultado fue la
correlación negativa y significativa que indica que, a mayor satisfacción en la
relación, menor impacto del confinamiento en los ámbitos de tranquilidad,
felicidad, salud, condición física y bienestar emocional. Conclusión:
Las personas que evalúan su relación de pareja como satisfactoria perciben
menor impacto durante la contingencia por COVID-19 en los diferentes ámbitos de
su vida.
Palabras
clave: coronavirus, pareja, pandemia,
cuarentena, aislamiento, salud mental
INTRODUCTION
The main health
issue during 2020 has been the COVID-19 pandemic. In Mexico, non-essential
school and work activities for the population were suspended, implementing a
quarantine or voluntary confinement as of March 23 (Ministry of the Interior,
2020). Confinement has been an international strategy to stop the spread of
COVID-19, which consists of social isolation and voluntary protection of people
in their homes, which has an impact on daily life and restrictions on the
practice of activities outside the home (Sandín, Valiente, García-Escalera, & Chorot, 2020).
The change in routine due to confinement has allowed
people to choose to do rewarding activities, which help them live their life as
well as possible (Polizzi et al., 2020). According to Dekel,Hankin, Pratt, Hackler, and Lanman (2015), finding ways to interact and
appreciate life during massive traumas, is a robust predictor of increased
psychological well-being and reduction of post-traumatic symptoms.
Although it has been indicated that this crisis affects intimate
relationships (Stanley & Markman, 2020), the focus of research on the
impact of the pandemic on mental health has been mainly at the individual
level. Evidence of this is the work of Zambrano, Serrato and Galindo (in
press), who carried out a bibliometric analysis in the SCOPUS database in the psychology
collection, identifying 223 articles published in the first semester of 2020,
finding that the majority of the studies were conducted in China and are
focused on anxiety and depression, thus suggesting that research be conducted
focused on the effects of the pandemic on academic performance, job stress, job
performance, marital satisfaction, sexual behavior , among other phenomena.
Thus, few
investigations have focused on couples in confinement, which have focused on
the risk of violence (Aponte et al., 2020), the division of domestic work
(Carlson, Petts, & Pepin 2020; Chung et al. , 2020), in marital conflicts
(Chung, Chan, Lanier, & Wong, 2020), or in the effects on sexual behavior
(Arafat, Mohamed, Kar, Sharma, & Kabir, 2020); Furthermore, recommendations
have been published for therapeutic strategies that contribute to preserving
and protecting relationships during contingency (Stanley & Markman, 2020).
However, to the best of our knowledge, no research has been published focused
on positive well-being variables such as marital satisfaction and its
relationship with the impact of confinement due to COVID-19.
Boland and Follingstad
(1987) consider marital satisfaction as a general description of attitudes,
feelings and evaluations of the relationship, in terms such as happy / unhappy,
satisfactory / unsatisfactory. Moral (2015) suggests that satisfaction with the
couple relationship is favored by the support
and open communication in the couple, while emotional states such as depression
and financial difficulties, impair marital satisfaction. Thus, satisfaction
with the partner refers to a multidimensional entity that includes aspects of
adjustment, happiness, consensus and cohesion.
Prime, Wade and
Browne (2020) indicate that the couple, being the leaders of the family, have
the responsibility to generate hope and emotional security; in addition to
negotiating family rules, rituals, and routines, while facing extraordinary
levels of uncertainty, family disruption, and fear due to the ongoing pandemic.
The authors add that it is important to note that families will be affected
differently by the health, social and economic consequences of the COVID-19
pandemic.
Considering the
above, the purpose of this study was to evaluate the relationship between marital
satisfaction through the Relationship Assessment Scale and the perceived impact
of confinement due to COVID-19 in different areas of the lives of couples, in a
Mexican sample.
METHOD
Participants
This work corresponds to a partial report of a broader investigation.
The data were collected from May 18 to 25, 2020. The inclusion criteria to meet
the objective of this study were that people were in isolation, that they
reported leaving their home only to work or not going out at all, being
residents in Mexico and living with their partner, regardless of the legal
status of their union (common law or married). Information on the city or state
of origin was not requested, so there is no further information on its
geographic and sociocultural context.
The
participation of 101 people who met the inclusion criteria was achieved. The
average age was 41.2 years (SD = 10.7); 84.2% married and 15.8% in common law
union. 55 women (54.5%) and 46 men (45.5%) participated; 59.4% indicated having
one or two children (n = 60), 8.9% said they had 3 or 4 children, 29.7%
reported not having children (n = 30) and two people mentioned that none of
their children lived in the same house that they. 37.6% indicated having
postgraduate studies, 47.5% undergraduate and the rest technical career, high
school or secondary education.
Instruments
The
Relationship Assessment Scale (RAS) by Hendrick (1988) was used in its
validation for Mexico by Moral (2008). It consists of a unifactorial
Likert-type scale that globally measures the satisfaction of the couple's
relationship through seven items with a range of 1 to 5, presenting a range of
7 to 35 points; a higher score reflects a higher assessment / satisfaction with
the couple's relationship. Moral (2008) reported an internal consistency of .81
in a Mexican sample. In this study, Cronbach's alpha was .92.
To assess the
perceived impact of confinement, the question was asked: How much do you
consider that staying at home has affected you in the following areas:
tranquility, work, happiness, finances, health, physical condition, emotional
well-being? The response options ranged from 0 = almost nothing to 4 = I can't
stand it anymore. Cronbach's alpha was estimated, finding a coefficient of .82,
the inter-item correlations were positive and were in the range of .20 to .75,
so it is considered that these questions can be added as indicators of the
perception of impact confinement.
Additionally,
they were asked about the number of exits from home in the last week and the
reason, how many hours a day were invested in watching news, press conferences
or statements related to COVID-19, what activities had helped them cope with
confinement and what they considered the most difficult about being in
confinement.
Process
The
questionnaires were disseminated via the internet with the survey management
application Google Forms. The survey was online May 18-25, 2020.
IBM® SPSS®
Statistics 24 was used. A descriptive analysis of the variables was performed.
The Kolmogorov-Smirnov test indicated that the RAS scores did not fit a normal
distribution (Z = 0.179, p = .001). The Mann Whitney U test was used to
identify the differences between groups, and the Spearman coefficient was used
to evaluate the correlations, with a significance level of p <.05.
Ethical aspects
This research
was evaluated and approved in its ethical and methodological aspects by
researchers from the Research Team in Social and Health Psychology of the
Autonomous University of Nuevo León.
At the
beginning of the questionnaire, the purpose of the research was explained, and
the participant was asked to continue answering if he agreed. The anonymity and
confidentiality of the information provided was guaranteed at all times.
RESULTS
Average marital satisfaction was 29.6 (SD = 5.8) with
a median of 31 points and equivalence in the scores between men and women (Z =
0.045, p = .964). The participants indicated that during the last week the
average number of outings from home was 2.2 (SD = 0.37); the main reason for
leaving was to buy food or medicine. The hours invested in viewing news and
communications related to COVID-19 was 1.4 (SD = 1.3), varying from less than
an hour to 7 hours a day.
Among the activities reported to cope with
confinement, those focused on maintaining a routine such as: setting schedules
(25.7%), and performing pleasant activities, such as: watching movies or series
(21.8%) and exercising (14.9%) had a higher frequency ); the rest reported
other pleasant activities, such as spending time with their pet, listening to
music, and spending time with the family, among others.
The participants indicated that the most difficult
thing about being in confinement was not being able to go out to have fun
(40.6%), a small percentage indicated that the most difficult thing was having
to be at home (8.9%) and the rest was distributed between not being able to
have contact physical with other people, not being able to go to work, having
to work online and not being able to go on a trip.
In Table 1 it
can be seen that health is the area considered least affected by staying at
home, followed by happiness. The areas most affected were work, fitness and
finances.
Table 2 shows
the correlations between the study variables. It can be observed that, the
higher marital satisfaction, the lower the impact of confinement in
tranquility, happiness, health, physical condition and emotional well-being.
Additionally, the higher the satisfaction, the less time spent watching news
related to COVID-19.
Considering the impact of confinement as a score that
adds up the 7 areas evaluated, the average score was 8.2 (SD = 5.3), showing a
negative and significant correlation with marital satisfaction (rs = -.365, p = .001). Likewise, dividing the
sample according to the quartiles of the impact scores of the confinement, a
comparison of the two extreme groups was made (quartile 25, impact between 0
and 4; quartile 75, impact greater than 12), finding a significant difference
in marital satisfaction (Z = -3.185, p = .001).
DISCUSSION
The purpose of this study was to evaluate the
relationship between marital satisfaction and the perceived impact of
confinement in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic. The relationship found
indicates that those people with greater satisfaction in their relationship
perceive less impact from confinement. Considering that satisfaction with the
couple relationship is favored by the support
and communication in the couple (Moral,
2015), it is deduced that dialogue, conversation and mutual support contribute
to reducing the perceived impact of confinement.
Likewise, it was identified that people carry out
various activities that help to cope with the confinement situation. In
relation to this, Polizzi, Polizzi, Lynn,
and Perry,(2020) indicate that
engaging in rewarding activities, such as hobbies, solving puzzles, reading,
listening to music, singing, playing an instrument, watching television,
learning a language, playing games, and even preparing for a better life change
after the pandemic, it can help people live their life to the best of their
ability; While those focused on negative aspects such as exposing themselves to
watching news related to COVID-19 for many hours, present worse satisfaction
with their relationship. Confinement has been described as an event that
produces discomfort (Hawryluck et al., 2004; Rubin & Wessely, 2020),
however, according to the results of this study, people who value their
relationship as satisfactory seem to face better that situation and perceive less
impact.
The results of this research are directly applicable
in the care of people affected by confinement, Pietromonaco and Overall (2020)
indicate that many couples will be susceptible to stress related to the
pandemic and suggest that these couples may benefit from working with
professionals to strengthen the adaptive relationship processes, communication
strategies and mutual support. These interventions would improve marital
satisfaction, which is related to the perceived impact of confinement, according
to the present findings.
It is suggested
for future research to return to the evaluation of positive variables that
allow to identify, within this specific context of the COVID-19 pandemic, the
aspects to emphasize in the prevention and psychological treatment
interventions during the contingency.
The study has limitations that make it difficult to
generalize the results. Among them, the sample size and its own
characteristics, among which the high score on the RAS scale and the level of
studies of the participants stand out. However, the results of this study
represent an important contribution to the line of research on mental health in
times of the coronavirus; since, as far as we know, it is the first to consider
marital satisfaction in the Spanish-speaking population, in the context of
COVID-19 contingency and assess its relationship to the impact on different
areas of Mexican couples' lives in confinement.
ORCID
Lucia Quezada
Berumen https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4705-3225
René Landero
Hernandez https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9694-8116
Monica Teresa
González Ramírez https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9058-9626
AUTHORS
'CONTRIBUTION
Lucía Quezada Berumen: validation, research,
writing, project administration.
René Landero Hernández: methodology,
resources, writing, supervision.
Mónica Teresa González Ramírez: conceptualization, formal analysis,
writing, visualization.
FUNDING
The study was self-financed.
CONFLICT OF INTERESTS
The authors declare that there is no conflict of
interest.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Does not apply.
REVIEW
PROCESS
This study has been peer-reviewed in a
double-blind manner.
DECLARATION
OF DATA AVAILABILITY
The data of the present study will be
available to the scientific community that requests them from the corresponding
author.
DISCLAIMER
OF LIABILITY
The authors are responsible for all
statements made in this article. Neither Interactions nor the Peruvian
Institute of Psychological Orientation are responsible for the statements made
in this document.
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