Growth in Early Marriage (GEM) Project: A Longitudinal Study of Newly Married Couples, 2015

Newlywed couples (opposite sex) were recruited primarily from marriage license records (for more details, see Beck, Pietromonaco, DeBuse, Powers, Sayer, 2013). Data were collected from December 2008 – June 2015. Eligibility criteria at Time 1 were that partners were between 18-50 years, in their first marriage, had no children, and could attend a lab session within the first 7 months of their marriage, and that wives were not pregnant. Couples attended a lab session at three time points over the first 3-4 years of marriage. Sample included 225 couples at Time 1; 201 couples at Time 2 (about 19 mos after first visit); 180 couples at Time 3 (about 37 mos after first visit). At each session, couple members provided saliva samples at five time points before, during and after a discussion of a major area of disagreement in their relationship and one sample at home (provided at the same time of day as their first lab sample). In the lab, couples talked for 15 minutes about a disagreement while being digitally recorded. All conflict discussions at each of the three waves were coded by trained observers using the Secure Base Coding Scheme (Crowell et al., 2002) and the Rapid Marital Interaction Coding System (Heyman, 2004). At the end of the session, couples talked for 5 minutes about what they liked about their partner and relationship, and this interaction was digitally recorded. Questionnaires were completed before and after the discussion at each session. This research has been approved by the University of Massachusetts, Amherst Institutional Research Board.