Visual Data Mining: A Study on Marriage Satisfaction

Although previous studies have discussed the impact of various factors on marital satisfaction, there have been few studies investigating the complex relationships among influencing factors of marital satisfaction due to limitations in analytical tools. This study used network analysis, a visual data mining technique, to test how ten widely recognized factors that significantly affected marital satisfaction were interrelated and their relative impact on overall marital satisfaction. This study involved 635 adults who were married for 8.20 ± 7.06 years. The results indicated that among many factors, MS1 "Personality and habits" had the most contact with other nodes in the network, suggesting that it might be the foundation of marriage. In addition, MS6 "Leisure satisfaction" had the closest direct relationship with overall marital satisfaction and might have had the strongest direct impact on marital satisfaction. This study deepened our understanding of marital satisfaction, provided a new perspective for social workers and marriage therapists to understand and enhance intimate relationships, and demonstrated the broad potential of visual data mining in psychological research.