Communicated Sense-making After Miscarriage: A Dyadic Analysis of Spousal Communicated Perspective-Taking, Well-being, and Parenting Role Salience

ABSTRACT

Grounded in communicated sense-making (CSM) theorizing, we investigated communicated perspective-taking (CPT; i.e., conversational partners’ attendance to and confirmation of each other’s views) in association with individual and relational well-being in married couples who had miscarried (n = 183; N = 366). Actor–partner interdependence modeling revealed husbands’ perceptions of wives’ CPT were positively related to husbands’ positive affect about the miscarriage and both spouses’ relational satisfaction, as well as negatively associated with wives’ positive affect. Wives’ perceptions of husbands’ CPT related positively to their own relational satisfaction and negatively to husbands’ negative affect. Analyses revealed identification as a parent to the miscarried child (i.e., “parenting role salience”) positively moderated the relationship between CPT and relational satisfaction. Implications for advancing CSM theorizing in health contexts and practical applications are explored.

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank all those who shared their miscarriage experiences and those who contributed to participant recruitment, especially Dr. Judy Stern with the Infertility Family Research Registry.

Funding

This project was funded by the University of Missouri’s Richard Wallace Faculty Incentive Grant.

Notes

¹ Although the current study later employed APIM, which ultimately tests the relationships between observed variables, conducting a CFA before an APIM allows the researcher to identify problematic items before creating composite variables (Kline, 2011). In the CFA, then, the variables are treated as latent structures in order to “clean” the data prior to the APIM.

Additional information

Funding

This project was funded by the University of Missouri’s Richard Wallace Faculty Incentive Grant.