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CONCEPTUAL ANALYSIS article

Front. Sociol.
Sec. Sociology of Families
Volume 10 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fsoc.2025.1490385

Explaining the Prevalence of Marital Conflict: Conceptual Bifurcation and Sociological Explanations

Provisionally accepted
Wing-Chung Ho Wing-Chung Ho *
  • City University of Hong Kong, Kowloon, Hong Kong, SAR China

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    Sociologists have investigated extensively marital conflict which is supposedly "antithesis" of marriage. However, there is little systematic reflection on how the coexistence of universal marriage and prevalent spousal discord in diverse cultural settings can possibly explained sociologically. This conceptual paper aims to address this issue by first critically reviewing how scholars have assessed the prevalence of marital conflict in human societies. This review is then extended to the conceptual elusiveness in gauging "marital conflict," arguing that the concept has been inadvertently bifurcated as i) a constituent (oft-represented as a single global continuous measure) of certain critical consequential events within a marriage (e.g., divorce); and ii) a predisposition (oft-represented in terms of a set of multifarious binary variables) in pair-bonding relationships that increases the likelihood of the occurrence of certain critical consequential events. Such conceptual bifurcation sheds light on two board distinctive approachesroughly termed contextual and evolutionarythrough which the coexistence of marriage formation and martial conflict can be sociologically explained. Implications are briefly discussed.

    Keywords: Marriage, marital conflict, conceptual bifurcation, contextual explanation, evolutionary explanation

    Received: 03 Sep 2024; Accepted: 13 Jan 2025.

    Copyright: © 2025 Ho. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Wing-Chung Ho, City University of Hong Kong, Kowloon, Hong Kong, SAR China

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