A Programmatic Review: Building a Two-Way Bridge between Social Psychology and the Study of the Early Years of Marriage

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Abstract
We summarize our programmatic efforts to make use of several critical processes advanced by social psychological theorists that have direct relevance to the study of marriage. We show how these processes have been useful in our Early Years of Marriage Project, a longitudinal study of marital phenomena among black couples and white couples, and in other similar longitudinal marital studies. We also argue that, in such marital research, we can understand many aspects of social interaction not easily studied elsewhere in social psychology, and thus important new insights about the nature of social psychological processes in general emerge. We thus extend the richness of the general theoretical processes with which we started.