A ‘Thank You’ really would be nice: Perceived gratitude in family relationships

ABSTRACT

The current study investigated perceived gratitude in multiple family relationships (i.e. couple, parent-older child, parent-younger child) and their unique associations with couple, parenting, and individual outcomes. Study hypotheses were executed from a nationwide sample of 593 parents that were married or in a romantic relationship. Results indicated perceived gratitude from romantic partners was associated with couple relationship satisfaction but was not associated with parenting stress; conversely, perceived gratitude from children was associated with parenting stress but was not associated with couple relationship satisfaction. Perceived gratitude from romantic partners and from older children, but not younger children, were associated with less psychological distress. Some moderation effects by sex were also observed. Additionally, women were found to report lower levels of perceived gratitude from romantic partners and from older children than men. Findings highlight the unique benefits of perceived gratitude from different family relationships for improving various domains of family well-being.

KEYWORDS:

• Couples
• gratitude
• parenting
• psychological distress
• relationship satisfaction

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Sample size was determined based on available funding for the project as well as to ensure for potential person-centered analyses in future studies with the dataset, the recommended number of participants (i.e. >500; Howard & Hoffman, 2018).

2. In research comparing data quality among various online platforms, Prolific provided significantly higher data quality than other platforms (e.g. Qualtrics, MTurk; Peer et al., 2022).

3. To support potential future retention efforts (pending funding for future data collection).

4. 31 entries failed one attention check and 1 entry failed two attention checks.

5. Other measures originally considered for the current study but not included given strong correlations with other variables included: relationship confidence and relationship stability (with relationship satisfaction [r > 0.76; all p < .001]), perceived stress (with psychological distress [r = 0.80; all p < .001]), and education (with income [r = 0.51; p < .001]).

6. Two sex moderation effects qualify some main effect findings for perceived child gratitude, which are discussed later in the Discussion section.