From Bad to Worse? Pornography Consumption, Spousal Religiosity, Gender, and Marital Quality
AUTHOR(S)
PUBLISHED
2016 in Sociological Forum, Vol. 31(2), pp. 441-464
KEY FINDINGS
- This study found that pornography porn consumption is negatively related to marital satisfaction.
ABSTRACT
Pornography consumption is consistently associated with lower marital quality. Scholars have theorized that embeddedness within a religious community may exacerbate the negative association between pornography use and marital quality because of greater social or psychic costs to porn viewing. As a test and extension of this theory, I examine how being married to a religiously devout spouse potentially moderates the link between respondents' reported pornography consumption and their marital satisfaction. Data are taken from... READ FULL ABSTRACT
EXCERPTS
- "Consistent with previous research, the analyses reveal that those who more frequently view pornography report lower levels of overall marital satisfaction than those who view pornography less frequently or never. Correspondingly, those with more religiously devout spouses report greater marital satisfaction, all else being equal. The interaction effects reveal, however, that rather than attenuating the negative relationship between pornography consumption and marital satisfaction, spousal religiosity actually exacerbates it. That is to say, the negative association between pornography consumption and marital satisfaction increases in magnitude as spousal religiosity increases."
