Relationship quality and depressive symptoms in an autoregressive longitudinal study

Depressive symptoms and relationship quality have been shown by the literature to be intricately linked in couples. This paper considered subjective and objective measures of relationship quality and subjective measures of depressive symptoms in a longitudinal autoregressive model. The participants were a subset from the Flourishing Families Project consisting of 240 couples after data screening was performed. The model looked at how these variables predicted each other over a three year period. Both husbands\u27 and wives\u27 depressive symptoms scores predicted within-subject through all three waves of data, as did husbands and wives relationship quality. Intra-construct and cross-lagged predictors were not as common but present some potentially important findings for the literature. Limitations and further research are discussed