This chapter establishes the social and intellectual background of the research: how what began as a personal interest evolves into a comprehensive investigation which provides novel insights into a scholarly understanding of discursive identity construction. Through a ‘pinning-down’ process, this chapter reviews relevant literatures in interpersonal communication studies (esp. the notion of ‘conflict style’), sociolinguistics or variationist linguistics (e.g., the conceptualisation of identity and the selection of linguistic features), Conversation Analysis and interactional linguistics (e.g., the contingency of dispute resolution and conflict style formation), and Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) and the Appraisal framework (e.g., the focus on textual identity construction at the level of meanings rather than wording and/or phonology). It also explains why the research adopts multiple lines of inquiry on patterns in the disputing spouses’ evaluative language use, along with an overview of what was entailed analytically and methodologically in each line of inquiry.