中華心理衛生協會

Purpose: In Chinese societies, the psychology of love is a relatively under-studied area; conflict management in the context of an intimate relationship is even more rarely studied. In the prevailing Chinese collectivist and social-oriented culture, one's partner's conflict management behaviors and styles might have great impacts on one's own perceptions and evaluations of the relationship quality. The purpose of the present study thus was to explore the relationships between partner's conflict management and one's own satisfaction towards a love relationship. This is a fresh angle to look at conflict management in intimate relationships, reflecting a distinct Chinese cultural character.Methods: A pilot study was conducted to test the suitability of self-developed scales as well as the transportability of scales in western origin. In the formal study, structural questionnaires were used to collect research information. University students in Northern Taiwan with dating relationships participated in the study and 275 returned valid questionnaires. There were near equal proportion of male and female respondents, with a mean age of 21.33. Most of them (95.6%) were heterosexual.Results: Analyses revealed that partner's conflict management (integrating and obliging) positively correlated with one's own relationship satisfaction, whereas partner's dominating conflict management negatively correlated with one's own relationship satisfaction. Structural equation modeling analysis revealed some interesting gender differences in mechanisms facilitating relationship quality. Specifically, for women, integration, dominance, and avoidance affected relationship satisfaction through one's satisfaction towards partner's conflict management; for men, integration was the only factor affecting relationship satisfaction through one's satisfaction towards partner's conflict management.Conclusions: Research results indicate the importance of partner's conflict management behaviors and styles on one's own perceptions and evaluations of the relationship quality, for Chinese university students. The implications of these findings were incorporated in the wider prevailing Chinese collectivist and social-oriented cultural framework. Furthermore, our results also highlighted the intriguing differentials regarding both preferred and most often adopted conflict management behaviors for men and women in love relationships. These results were discussed in the context of gender-based power imbalance in intimate relationships.