The master's thesis is focusing on couples' relationship quality in couples with children, compared to couples without children. The theoretical part describes the partnership relationship, the characteristics of a quality partnership relationship, and the changes, that occur in a partnership; in the period of falling in love, in the period after falling in love and after the arrival of the child in the family. The empirical part presents the results of the comparison of participants with children, and participants without children. The author is using quantitative research with the Dyadic Adjustment Scale (DAS, Spanier 1976). The research involved 572 participants; 525 women (91.8%) and 47 men (8.2%). The average age of the participants is 31.13 years, the duration of the participants' partnership is 8.54 years on average. There are 207 participants (36.2%) without children, while the other 365 participants (63.8%) have children. Due to demographic differences between participants, the criteria for the age restriction and the duration of the partnership were used for specific hypotheses, so the groups were more comparable with each other (in this case, there were 265 participants included).
The results showed that the quality of the relationship for couples with children does not necessarily improve or decrease. Furthermore, couples with children also do not have any more conflicts or less cohesion than partners without children. The results showed that participants who have a child under the age of one, on average have a higher quality of partnership than participants who have older children. The couples' relationship quality may also be affected by other reasons, such as: what kind of a relationship had the partners have before the birth of a child, how long are they in a relationship, the motive on which they decided to have a child and how they are coping with the changes. As in the previous studies, the results of this study also did not show any uniform results regarding the effect of children on couples' relationship quality.
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