Abstract
Marital discord has several negative effects on youth, including development of both externalizing behaviors such as aggression, bullying, and defiance and internalizing behaviors such as depression and anxiety. The purpose of this study was to understand the relationships between marital discord and mental health outcomes in adolescents with biological sex as a moderating variable. This study utilizes data from Princeton University’s Fragile Family and Child Wellbeing Study and uses linear regression to investigate these relationships. It was hypothesized that increased marital discord would result in poorer outcomes, with males having higher rates of externalizing behavior and females having higher rates of internalizing behavior. The data was coded using SPSS and analyzed using Stata. Participants were approximately 15-year old youth who had responded to the Wave 15 follow-up of the Fragile Families Study (N = 4,897). Marital discord was significantly related to both externalizing behavior and depression-related internalizing behavior, but was not associated with anxiety-related internalizing behaviors. In sex-specific models, marital discord was associated with both depression and anxiety-related internalizing behavior for females, but was not associated with any of the outcome variables for males. Based on the results, marital discord appears to be particularly more impactful for female youth compared to male youth.