Adolescent siblings in stepfamilies: functioning and adolescent adjustment. Marital satisfaction, relationships, and...

The current study is one of the few attempts to examine the quality of marital relations in long-remarried families in diverse types of stepfamilies and compare them to long-established marriages in never-divorced families using a multimeasure, multirespondent design, which included observations. Early in a remarriage the new stepparent is often in a position of greater marginality than the biological parent is, and the marital relationship may be less central than in nonstepfamilies. Thus, the important differences between first marriages and remarriages may be in the salience rather than in the quality of the marital relationship. This will be explored as relations among family subsystems and child adjustment are examined in subsequent chapters.