Investigation of marital satisfaction, interpersonal cognitive distortions and gender roles of police officers

The aim of this study is to determine marital satisfaction, interpersonal cognitive distortions and gender role levels of male police officers and to investigate the relationship between interpersonal cognitive distortions, gender role levels, some demographic and occupational properties and marital satisfaction. Marital Life Scale, Interpersonal Cognitive Distortions Scale, Bem Sex Role Inventory and Personel Information Form were used to obtain the data of the study. Descriptive statistics, one way analyses of variance and hierarchical regression analyses were used to analyse the data collected from 687 male police officers working in several departments of Eskişehir Police Department. The research findings reveal that the male police officers have high levels of marital satisfaction, average levels of interpersonal rejection, unrealistic relationship expectations and mind reading and high levels of femininity and masculinity. The results of regression analysis have revealed that masculinity, femininity, interpersonal rejection and working in a department with/without branch are important predictors of marital satisfaction and all these variables explain %15 of the total variance. According to this result marital satisfaction increases according to masculinity and femininity. As interpersonal rejection increases, marital satisfaction decreases and according to branch, male police officers those are working in a department with branch have higher marital satisfaction levels. Age, marriage length, seniority, spouses working status, whether or not to have children, unrealistic relationship expectations and mind reading are not important predictors of marital satisfaction. According to findings of the research, marital satisfaction levels have significant differences according to the gender roles. According to this finding male police officers who have ambiguous gender role have lower marital satisfaction levels than male police officers who have feminine, masculine and androgen gender roles. Key Words: Gender role, cognitive distortion, marital satisfaction, police officer