While unstable and unsatisfactory romantic relationship results in psycho-emotional problems or maladjustment to life with loss of self-control, satisfactory romantic relationship allows one to pursue balanced development of personality as a person an...
While unstable and unsatisfactory romantic relationship results in psycho-emotional problems or maladjustment to life with loss of self-control, satisfactory romantic relationship allows one to pursue balanced development of personality as a person and emotional well-being. Also, romantic relationship in early adulthood has been established as a societal normative procedure because the average wedding age of women tends to increase as women’s social statuses promote. Thus, the purpose of this study is to explore the relationship between adult attachment and romantic relationship satisfaction that play great roles in enhancing satisfaction with romantic relationship, and investigate influence of self-identity from the relationship of the two. That is to say, with female university students as its subjects, and with adult attachment as an independent variable and romantic relationship as a dependent one, it tries to test the effects of self-identity as a mediating variable between the two variables. The subjects of this study were 321 female university students (average age 21.05) attending a university located in Seoul. The research tools used in this study included the close relation experience questionnaire (Fraley, Waller and Brennan, 2000) adapted by Kim(2004), the scale of satisfaction with romantic relationship(Snyder, 1979) factor-analyzed by Lee(2000), and the Korean self-identity test made up and modified by Lee(1999). The results of this study can be summarized as follows. First, as for the relations among the variables, both attachment anxiety and attachment evasion, two dimensions of female university students’ adult attachment, showed statistically significant negative correlations with their satisfaction with romantic relationship. Also, the two dimensions showed statistically significant negative correlations with self-identity. But self-identity showed statistically significant positive correlations with satisfaction with romantic relationship. Second, this study confirmed the influence of adult attachment (attachment anxiety and evasion) and self-identity on satisfaction with romantic relationship based on associations among individual variables, and as a result, the explanatory power of the variables turned out to be Also, of the factors influencing satisfaction with romantic relationship, self-identity had the greatest influence, and then attachment anxiety turned out as the next significant variable. However, attachment evasion did not have influence on satisfaction with romantic relationship statistically. Third, as a result of checking whether self-identity mediated the influence of the two dimensions of adult attachment, attachment anxiety and attachment evasion, self-identity turned out to have partial mediating effects on the relations between satisfaction with romantic relationship and attachment anxiety and evasion. In order to make itself distinct from previous studies that have addressed only the relation between adult attachment and satisfaction with romantic relationship, this study has established self-identity, a variable greatly related with the two, as a mediating variable to attempt deeper and wider exploration of the intermediate course. As such, again we can confirm the importance of adult attachment, a variable increasing satisfaction with romantic relationship, and learn that self-identity has indirect influence between adult attachment and satisfaction with romantic relationship. Based on such results, in actual consulting scenes, we can give help to visitors with unstable attachment for the intervention direction of the consulting in relation with their level of self-identity. Including this, the study has discussed its limitations and made suggestions.