Gender role attitude, communication quality, and marital satisfaction among Korean adults

No previous research has examined the effect of gender role attitudes and communication on marital satisfaction among Korean couples. Using the 2015 Fact-Finding Survey in Families, I investigated the relationships among gender role attitude, communication quality, and marital satisfaction via latent mean analysis (LMA) and multigroup analysis using structural equation modelling (SEM). Significant differences were found in gender role attitude, communication quality, and marital satisfaction between males and females. Females had higher values for more egalitarian gender attitude; males had higher values for communication quality and marital satisfaction. Communication quality mediated the relationship between gender attitude and marital satisfaction, but differences between males and females existed in the paths of the variables. Gender role attitude had a direct and indirect effect on marital satisfaction for the female group, while communication quality played a full mediating role of the relationship between gender role attitude and marital satisfaction for the male group. In addition, communication quality had a stronger influence on marital satisfaction for the female group than the male group. These results would provide important implications for understanding the different mechanisms that egalitarian men were more satisfied in their communication and marriage, but egalitarian women were not in the Korean context.