Marital Conflict and Destructive Resolution Tactics: The Case of Bahir Dar City, Ethiopia

This study was conducted to examine the major causes of marital conflicts among couples in their day-to-day marital disagreements, the proportion of destructive conflict resolution tactics, the level of destructive conflict tactics, and the differences of destructive conflict tactics within couples. A total of 188 married women who live in Bahir Dar city were participated in the study. Causes of Marital Conflict Questionnaire and Conflict Tactics Scale were used to collect quantitative data. In addition, interview was conducted with eight participants to substantiate the quantitative findings. The result revealed that household responsibility, follow-up of child education, child caring, disparity in parenting, misunderstanding, lack of interest to generate income, carelessness, insufficient income for the family, extravagance, and lack of intimacy are found to be the major causes for marital conflict. It was also found that 60 percent of these participants employed destructive reasoning and 5 percent of them employed each verbal aggression and physical aggression frequently while resolving their marital dispute. The repeated-measures t-test results also showed that these participants practiced more destructive reasoning than verbal aggression and physical aggression, and more verbal aggression than physical aggression. Therefore, it was concluded that by practicing frequent destructive reasoning tactics, majority of the families of these participants seem placing themselves at risk of applying more hostile conflict tactic and obstructing their happiness.