Distress and Divorce: Establishing Cutoff Scores for the Marital Status Inventory

This study was designed to identify Marital Status Inventory (MSI) scores that could be used as cutoff points for degrees of marital distress. Cutoff scores are useful in clinical work as a way to estimate degrees of marital distress, differentiate couples for treatments, and to provide uniformity across studies. Subjects consisted of 474 couples requesting marital therapy at a university-based clinic. Based on their individual Marital Adjustment Test (MAT) scores, participants were placed in severely distressed, moderately distressed, and non-distressed groups. Using a discriminant analysis, MSI scores of 4 for husbands and 5 for wives were found to be useful cutoff points for severe distress.