The purpose of this thesis is to examine the effect of marital status on the quality of life. The domain of marriage is only one of the many domains of life experience that contribute to the assessment of the quality of life. The major focus is an investigation of the relationships among socioeconomic and demographic factors, marital status, and overall life satisfaction. Overall life satisfaction is conceptualized as a subjective measure of the quality of life, therefore, reported satisfaction with the quality of life and life satisfaction will be used interchangeably to refer to the subjective measure of quality of life. The analysis developed to accomplish the purposes of this thesis is a series of multiple regressions.