Although prominent theories of intimate relationships, and couples themselves, often conceive of relationships as fluctuating widely in their degree of closeness, longitudinal studies generally describe partners' satisfaction as stable and continuous or as steadily declining over time. The increasing use of group-based trajectory models (GBTMs) to identify distinct classes of change has reinforced this characterization, but these models fail to account for individual differences within classes and within-person variability across classes and may thus misrepresent how couples' satisfaction changes. The goal of the current analyses was to determine whether accounting for these additional sources of variance through growth mixture models (GMMs) alters characterizations of satisfaction changes over time. Applied to longitudinal data from 12 independent studies of first-married couples (combined N = 1,249 couples), GMMs that allowed for class-specific individual differences and within-person variability fit the data better than the GBTMs that constrained these to be equal across classes. Most notably, considerable within-person variability was evident within each class, consistent with the idea that spouses do indeed fluctuate in their satisfaction. Spouses who dissolved their marriages were 3.8-5.7 times more likely to be in classes characterized by greater volatility in satisfaction. Because the early years of marriage appear to be characterized by within-person fluctuations in satisfaction, time-varying correlates of these fluctuations are likely to be at least as important as time-invariant correlates in explaining why some marriages thrive where others falter. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

中文翻译：

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婚姻满意度的变化是持续稳定的，还是零星的、剧烈的？

尽管著名的亲密关系理论和夫妻本身经常认为关系的亲密程度波动很大，但纵向研究通常将伴侣的满意度描述为稳定和持续的，或者随着时间的推移稳步下降。越来越多地使用基于群体的轨迹模型（GBTM）来识别不同的变化类别，强化了这种特征，但这些模型未能考虑类别内的个体差异以及跨类别的个人差异，因此可能会歪曲夫妻满意度的变化方式。当前分析的目标是确定通过增长混合模型 (GMM) 解释这些额外的方差来源是否会改变满意度随时间变化的特征。将 12 项针对初婚夫妇的独立研究（总共 N = 1,249 对夫妇）的纵向数据应用于其中，考虑到类别特定的个体差异和人内变异性的 GMM 比限制这些数据在类别之间相等的 GBTM 更好地拟合数据。最值得注意的是，每个类别中明显存在相当大的人内差异，这与配偶满意度确实波动的观点一致。解除婚姻关系的配偶处于满意度波动较大的类别的可能性高出 3.8-5.7 倍。由于婚姻早期的特点似乎是人体内满意度波动，因此这些波动的时变相关性可能至少与时不变相关性一样重要，可以解释为什么有些婚姻蓬勃发展而另一些婚姻却步履蹒跚。（PsycInfo 数据库记录 (c) 2023 APA，保留所有权利）。