Marital researchers most often study the characteristics of marriages that are not working. A few years ago, I set out to profile the marriages of some of the smartest women I know (and their equally capable friends). Equipped with a budget of less than $500 for internet hosting and data collection programming, “David” that I was to the “Goliath” of media-funded polls, I had to get creative. I had been teaching a course in Personal Growth through the University of Florida for several consecutive semesters. Based on my strong interest in personal growth and my belief in the value of self-examination, I designed the Lifestyle Poll to simultaneously operate as a data collection tool and a stimulus for the personal growth of my research participants. I assembled a poll of over 200 questions and recruited participants primarily through unofficial networks of Harvard graduates. Word of the project spread organically, mostly through word of mouth and invitations between friends. My goal was to see if I could get 500 respondents within one year. Less than 8 months later, more than 1200 women had completed the poll.

As the data filtered in, what I once saw as an obstacle (the limited budget that necessitated design creativity) soon showed itself as an asset. In many traditional research studies, there is some inherent acknowledgment that people don’t really want to participate in studies, that most people would rather be doing other things with their time. So, in most cases, participation is either made as painless as possible (e.g. a very brief online measure that promises to take “only 10 minutes” or a few questions in a widely circulated magazine), or is induced through some extrinsic motivator (e.g. course credit, monetary reimbursement, entry into a raffle to win a big prize). In my opinion, making a measure shorter, and less painful, especially in the case of an anonymous online survey, would seem to produce a lot of “junk” data from people who are not invested in the research. Sweetening the pot with financial inducements may also affect the quality of one’s data. On the other hand, when people engage in behavior based on the type of intrinsic motivation that was a defining feature of the Lifestyle Poll project (e.g. an opportunity to do some meaningful self-reflection), they are more likely to invest genuine effort. In this case, because my participants had no extrinsic motivation at all to participate, and the Lifestyle Poll was so long, the significant “response cost” of participation suggests that the data was entered thoughtfully by respondents who were invested in the project due to intrinsic motivations. The feedback I received from many participants and the lengthy, thoughtful responses I received on open-ended questions that were posted over and above the 200+ question poll confirmed the presence of a high level of intrinsic motivation within the sample.

The Lifestyle Poll respondents represent a targeted sample, mostly pulled from a population of Harvard graduates in their late twenties to late thirties, who are working to fulfill the promise of an equal marriage. The divorce rate in my sample is very low (about 6%), and the level of marital satisfaction reported is very, very high despite the fact that the married women I polled openly acknowledge that their marriages are not perfect by any means (in fact, 41% have thought their marriage might be in trouble within the past three years). Given that most marriages succeed or fail within the first four years of a marriage, my sample is generally beyond the first four-year critical testing phase of their marriages, and the wives in the sample continue to feel that they are very much in love with their husbands. The information shared by these respondents provides deep insight into the inner workings of a marriage of equals. Because my sample is a highly targeted sample, I can no more generalize my results to all women or all people than anyone studying a very unique set of individuals. However, what I can do is profile the marriages of a fascinating group of women, and this is where things begin to get really interesting…

The book I’m writing up is a thinking person’s guide to how to create and sustain a marriage of equals that offers a bold, blunt and refreshingly truthful approach about what it really takes to create and sustain an exceptional marriage. (More information about my book).

Photo by Utaka Springer