A bad marriage may lead to a poor performance at work and serious health problems, according to a three-year study released in May by two Women's Studies Resource Center (WSRC) researchers."If you have a problem in a marriage, you aren't leaving the marriage behind when you walk out the door to work," said Rosalind Barnett, a senior scientist at the WSRC and executive director of its Community, Families & Work Program (CFWP). "Don't ignore a bad marriage, it has a bad effect on your biochemistry."

Barnett, along with program director of the CFWP Karen Gareis and Andrew Steptoe of University College London, monitored 105 participants' blood pressure and levels of a hormone known to indicate stress, cortisol. The participants were middle-age civil service workers in the London area.

Those who reported marital problems had higher blood pressure and cortisol levels than others who said they were content with their marriage. These effects were the same for men and women.

"The development of electronic monitoring devices and hormone measures from saliva have allowed assessments to be made as people commute to and from work, go through their daily tasks and relax in the evening," Steptoe said.

Steptoe had previously studied the effect of work stress, financial strain and social support on physical health. His next goal was to incorporate the impact of marital roles. He knew that Barnett had developed a quantitative scale to measure exactly this-marriage quality-and so collaboration came naturally.

The Marital Role Quality Scale is composed of 15 statements describing marriage. Participants must rate how much each item applies to their own marital relationship. Some items on the list are positive and some are negative, which enables researchers to double-check the opinions of the test subjects.

"There is lots of [research] on how work affects marriage and family life but we went in an unusual direction," Gareis said, noting that the current study investigated the reverse of the common question.

Men are often thought to place less importance on the quality of marriage, but in this study, both sexes were equally affected by the dynamic of relationships with their spouses.

"It's just as bad for men as it is for women. Before women worked, the household was their only role. If that [wasn't] going well, [you were] vulnerable. Now, women don't have all their eggs in one basket and bad marriages are bad for everyone," Gareis said.

Work between the team at Brandeis' WSRC and Steptoe at University College London took place between July 2002 to January 2005, when the study was accepted for publication. It was published in August 2005 in the journal Annals of Behavioral Medicine under the title "Martial-Role Quality and Stress-Related Indicators."

"It took a long time to set studies up, and to plan what to measure. We performed data collection for months," Gareis said.

As of this moment, the professional community has not had an opportunity to respond extensively to the study. However there have been some questions to the group. Barnett has also been contacted by various media organizations for more information about the study.