Interpersonal Relationships Summary – Book + Article done by SL
Chapter 1: The Building Blocks of Relationships
THE NATURE AND IMPORTANCE OF INTIMACY
The Nature of Intimacy
Intimate Relationships differ from more casual associations in at least seven specific ways: knowledge,
interdependence, caring, trust, responsiveness, mutuality, and commitment.
First, intimate partners have extensive personal, often confidential, knowledge about each other.
Interdependence is the extent to which they need and influence each other, and is frequent, strong,
diverse and enduring. Thus, one’s behavior affects one’s partner as well as oneself.
The qualities that make these close ties tolerable are caring, trust and responsiveness. Intimacy increases
when people believe that their partners understand, respect, and appreciate them, being attentively and
effectively responsive to their needs and concerned for their welfare. Responsiveness is powerfully
rewarding.
People who are intimate also consider themselves to be a couple instead of two entirely separate
individuals. They exhibit a high degree of mutuality (“us” instead of “me/her”).
Finally, if committed, they expect their partners to continue indefinitely, and they invest the time, effort
and resources that are needed to realize that goal. Without such commitment, people who were once
very close may find themselves less and less interdependent and knowledgeable about each other as
time goes by.
None of these components is absolutely required for intimacy to occur, and each may exist when the
others are absent. In general, the most satisfying and meaningful intimate relationships include all seven
of these defining characteristics. Still, intimacy can exist to a lesser degree when only some of them are
in place. However, intimacy can also vary enormously over the course of a long relationship. There is no
one kind of intimate relationship, but they come in all shapes.
The Need to Belong
There is a need to belong in close relationships, and if the need is not met, a variety of problems follows.
Our need to belong is presumed to necessitate “regular social contact with those to whom one feels
connected.” We only need a few close relationships; when the need to belong is satiated, our drive to
form additional relationships is reduced. Quality is more important than quantity. It also doesn’t matter
much who our partners are; as long as they provide us stable affection and acceptance, our need can be
satisfied. Thus, when an important relationship ends, we are often able to find replacement partners
who are nonetheless able to satisfy our need to belong.
Some of the support for this need to belong theory comes from the ease with which we form
relationships with others and from the tenacity with which we then resist the dissolution of our existing
social ties. People with insufficient intimacy in their lives are at risk for health problems and have higher
mortality rates. Losing one’s existing ties to others is damaging, too. Our mental and physical health is
also affected by the quality of our connections to others. In contrast, psychiatric problems, anxiety
disorders, and substance abuse tend to afflict those with troubled ties to others. On the surface, such
patterns do not necessarily mean that shallow, superficial relationships cause psychological problems;
after all, people who are prone to such problems may find it difficult to form loving relationships in the
first place. Lack of intimacy can both cause such problems and make them worse. Our well-being seems
to depend on how well we satisfy the need to belong. The need to belong has been evolutionary
adaptive, making it more likely that one’s children would survive and thrive.
,THE INFLUENCE OF CULTURE
-Fewer people are marrying than ever before.
-People are waiting longer to marry.
-People routinely live together even when they’re not married.
-People often have babies even when they’re not married.
-Almost one-half of all marriages end in divorce, a failure rate that’s 2 times higher. Divorce rates has
been slowly decreasing for couples with college degrees.
-Most preschool children have mothers who work outside the home.
The role that marriage and parenthood will play in our lives have changed substantially in recent years.
Marriage is now a choice, even if a baby is on the way. Cultural standards provide a foundation for our
relationships; they shape our expectations and define the patterns we think to be normal. Cohabitation
does not make it more likely that a marriage will be successful; instead, such cohabitation increases a
couple’s risk that they will later divorce. Couples who choose to cohabit are less committed to each
other than are those who marry – they are, after all, keeping their options open – so they encounter
more problems and uncertainties than married people. They experience more conflict, jealousy,
infidelity, and physical aggression. As a result, the longer people cohabit, the less enthusiastic about
marriage and the more accepting of divorce they become. As times passes, cohabitating couples
gradually become less likely to ever marry but not less likely to split up; 5 years down the road,
cohabitating couples are just as likely to break up as they were when they moved in together. Marriage
is fundamentally different. The longer a couple is married, the less likely they are to ever divorce.
Acceptance of cohabitation as a “trial run” is one reason why fewer people get married and fewer
marriages last now.
Sources of Change
Due to economics, societies tend to harbor more single people, tolerate more divorces, and support a
later age of marriage the more industrialized and affluent they become, and levels of socioeconomic
development have increased around the world. Education and financial resources allow people to be
more independent, so that women in particular are less likely to marry than they used to be.
Individualism is the support of self-expression and the emphasis on personal fulfillment that
characterizes Western cultures. Most of us are more materialistic and less concerned with others than
our grandparents were. This focus on our own happiness has led us to expect more personal gratification
from our intimate partnerships – more pleasure and delight, and fewer hassles and sacrifices – than our
grandparents did. We feel justified in ending our partnerships to seek contentment elsewhere if we
become dissatisfied. Eastern cultures promote a more collective sense of self in which people feel more
closely tied to their families and social groups, and the divorce rates in such cultures are much lower
than they are in the US.
Due to modern reproductive technology, women can also control their fertility and American women are
having fewer children than they used to.
Modern communication technologies also transform how relationships are conducted nowadays.
Facebook provides an entertaining and efficient way to (help to) satisfy our needs for social contact, but
it can also create problems for lovers, who have to decide when to change their status and announce
that they’re now “in a relationship”. The amazing reach and ready availability of modern technology may
too often tempt us to “give precedence to people we are not with over people we are with”.
Finally, influence on the norms that govern relationships is the relative numbers of young men and
women in a given culture. Societies and regions of the world in which men are more numerous than
,women tend to have very different standards than those in which women outnumber men. When the
sex ratio is high, there are more men than women; when it is low, there are fewer men than women.
Cultures with high sex ratios tend to support traditional, old-fashioned roles for men and women. After
the men buy expensive engagement rings, women stay home raising children while the men work
outside the home. Such cultures also tend to be sexually conservative. In contrast, cultures with low sex
ratios tend to be less traditional and more permissive. Women seek high-paying careers, and they are
allowed to have sexual relationships outside of marriage. If a pregnancy occurs, unmarried motherhood
is an option. The specifics vary with each historical period.
THE INFLUENCE OF EXPERIENCE
Infants display various patterns of attachment styles to their major caregivers. Children with secure
attachment style find responsive care and protection to be reliably available and they learned that other
people are trustworthy sources of security and kindness. They happily bond with others and rely on
them comfortably, and the children readily develop trusting relationships.
For some, attentive care was unpredictable and inconsistent. Their caregivers were warm and interested
on some occasions but distracted, anxious, or unavailable on others. These children thus developed
fretful, mixed feelings about others known as anxious ambivalent attachments. Being uncertain of when
(or if) a departing caregiver would return, such children became nervous and clingy, and were needy in
their relationships with others.
For a third group of children, care was provided reluctantly by rejecting or hostile adults. Such children
learned that little good came from depending on others, and they withdrew from others with an
avoidant style of attachment. Avoidant children were often suspicious of and angry at others, and they
did not easily form trusting, close relationships.
Similar orientations toward close relationships could also be observed among adults. Most people said
that they were relaxed and comfortable depending on others; that is, they sounded secure in their
intimate relationships. If they were insecure, they either found it difficult to trust and to depend on their
partners, or they nervously worried that their relationships wouldn’t last. Secure people generally held
positive images of themselves and others, and remembered their parents as loving and supportive. In
contrast, insecure people viewed others with uncertainty or distrust, and remembered their parents as
inconsistent or cold.
However, there are four, rather than three patterns of attachments in adults. There are two different
reasons why people might wish to avoid being too close to others. In one case, people could want
relationships with others but be wary of them, fearing rejection and mistrusting them. In the other case,
people could be independent and self-reliant, genuinely preferring autonomy and freedom rather than
close attachments to others.
Thus, Bartholomew proposed four general categories of attachment styles. The fist is a secure style. The
second is a preoccupied style which is a new name for anxious ambivalence. Because they nervously
depend on other’s approval to feel good about themselves, such people worry about, and are
preoccupied with, the status of their relationships. The third and fourth styles reflected two different
ways to be “avoidant”. Fearful people avoid intimacy with others because of their fears of rejection.
Although they want others to like them, they worry about the risks of relying on others. People with a
dismissing style feel that intimacy with others just isn’t worth the trouble. Dismissing people rejected
interdependency with others because they felt self-sufficient, and they didn’t care much whether others
liked them or not.
Two broad themes underlie and distinguish these four styles of attachment. First, people differ in their
avoidance of intimacy, which affects the ease and trust with which they accept interdependent intimacy
,with others. People who are comfortable and relaxed in close relationships are low in avoidance,
whereas those who distrust others and keep their emotional distance are high in avoidance. People also
differ in their anxiety about abandonment, the dread that others will find them unworthy and leave
them. Secure people take great comfort in closeness with others and do not worry that others will
mistreat them; as a result, they gladly seek intimate interdependency with others. In contrast, with all
three of the other styles, people are burdened with anxiety or discomfort that leaves them less at ease in
close relationships. Preoccupied people want closeness but anxiously fear rejection. Dismissing people
don’t worry about rejection but don’t like closeness. And fearful people get it from both sides, being
uncomfortable with intimacy and worrying it won’t last. These two themes (avoidance of intimacy &
anxiety about abandonment) have continuous dimensions that range from low to high. The use of any of
the four categories is rather arbitrary in the middle ranges of anxiety and avoidance where the
boundaries of the categories meet.
The important point is that attachment styles appear to be orientations toward relationships that are
largely learned from our experiences with others. They are prime examples of the manner in which the
proclivities and perspectives we bring to a new relationship emerge in part from our experiences in prior
partnerships. Any relationship is shaped by many different influences and both babies and adults affect
through their own behavior the treatment they receive from others. Babies are born with various
temperaments and arousal levels and inborn differences in personality and emotionality make some
children easier to parent than others. Thus, the quality of parenting a baby receives can depend, in part,
on the child’s own personality and behavior; in this way, people’s attachment styles are influenced by
the traits with which they were born, and our genes shape our styles.
However, our experiences play much larger roles in shaping the styles we bring to subsequent
relationships. The levels of acceptance or rejection we receive from our parents are huge influences
early on. Expectant mothers who are glad to be pregnant are more likely to have secure toddlers a year
later than are mothers-to-be who are hesitant and uncertain. Once their babies are born, mothers who
enjoy intimacy and who are comfortable with closeness tend to be more attentive and sensitive
caregivers, so secure moms tend to have secure children whereas insecure mothers tend to have
insecure children. Indeed, when mothers with difficult, irritable babies are trained to be sensitive and
responsive parents, their toddlers are much more likely to end up securely attached to them than they
would have been in the absence of such training. The parenting adolescents receive as seventh graders
predicts how they will be have in their own romances and friendships when they are young adults;
teenagers who have parents who are happily married tend to be secure, and those who have nurturing
and supportive relationships with their parents have richer relationships with their lovers and friends
years later.
Being learned, attachment styles can be unlearned, and over time, attachment styles can change. A bad
breakup can make a formerly secure person insecure. Nevertheless, once they have been established,
attachment style can also be stable and long-lasting as they lead people to create new relationships that
reinforce their existing tendencies. By remaining aloof and avoiding interdependency, for instance,
fearful people may never learn that some people can be trusted and closeness can be comforting and
that perpetuates their fearful style. In the absence of dramatic new experiences, people’s styles of
attachment can persist for decades.
THE INFLUENCE OF INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES
There are four influential types of individual variation: sex differences, gender differences, personalities,
and self-esteem.
,Sex Differences
A normal curve describes the frequencies with which particular levels of some trait can be found in
people, and they demonstrate that (a) most people have talents or abilities that are only slightly better
or worse than average and (b) extreme levels of most traits, high or low, are very rare. Nevertheless,
actual sex differences take the form of the graphs which depict ranges of interests and talents that
overlap to a substantial extent.
The bottom line is that men and women usually overlap so thoroughly that they are much more similar
than different on most of the dimensions and topics of interest to relationship science. Individual
differences, not sexual differences, are more important influences on interpersonal interaction.
Gender Differences
Sex differences refers to biological distinctions between men and women that spring naturally from their
physical natures. In contrast, gender differences refer to social and psychological distinctions that are
created by our cultures and upbringing. For instance, when they are parents, women are mothers and
men are fathers – that’s a sex difference – but the common belief that women are more loving than men
reflects a gender difference. Distinguishing sex and gender differences is often tricky because the social
expectations and training we apply to men and women are often confounded with their biological sex.
Nevertheless, the distinction between sex and gender differences is meaningful because some influential
differences between men and women in relationships are largely taught to us as we grow up. Examples
of gender roles are the patterns of behavior that are culturally expected of “normal” men and women.
Men, of course, are supposed to be “masculine”. Women are expected to be “feminine”. To varying
degrees, men and women are expected to specialize in different kinds of social behaviors all over the
world. However, people inherit only about a quarter to a third of their tendencies to be assertive or kind;
most of these behaviors are learned.
Nevertheless, only half of us have attributes that fit these gender roles expectations cleanly. People who
are both assertive and warm, sensitive and self-reliant, possess both sets of the competencies that are
stereotypically associated with being male and with being female, and are said to be androgynous.
“Masculine” task-oriented talents are instrumental traits and “feminine” social and emotional skills are
expressive traits. And it’s not all that remarkable to find both sets of traits in the same individual.
Androgynous people would be comfortable and capable in both domains.
Women are high in expressiveness but low in instrumentality. Which is vice versa for men. Androgynous
people are both instrumental and expressive. About 15 percent of the people are either high in the skills
typically associated with the other sex (“cross-typed”) or low in both sets of skills (“undifferentiated”).
Equal proportions of men and women fall into the androgynous, cross-typed, and undifferentiated
categories, so, as with sex differences, it’s simplistic and inaccurate to think of men and women as
wholly distinct groups of people with separate, different traits. When an androgynous man met a
traditional woman, an androgynous woman met a traditional man, or two androgynous people got
together, they got along much better than traditional men and women did.
The disadvantage faced by traditional couples does not disappear as time goes by. They are generally
less happy with their marriages than nontraditional couples are. When human beings devote themselves
to intimate partnerships, they want affection, warmth, and understanding. People who are low in
expressiveness – who are not very warm, tender, sensitive people – do not readily provide such warmth
and tenderness; they are not very affectionate. Traditional men have romantic relationships of lower
quality than more expressive men do. Thus, traditional gender roles do men a disservice, depriving them
of skills that would make them more rewarding husbands. On the other hand, people who are low in
instrumentality – who are low in assertiveness and personal strength – tend to have low self-esteem and
,to be less well adjusted than those who have better task-oriented skills. People feel better about
themselves when they are competent and effective at “taking care of business”, so traditional gender
roles also do women a disservice, depriving them of skills that would facilitate more accomplishments
and achievements. However, gender expectations are stricter for men than for women; girls can be
tomboys and nobody frets too much, but if a boy is too feminine, people worry.
Personality
Attachment styles and gender differences can be affected by experience and may change over the time,
but personality traits are more stable and lasting and influence people’s behavior in their relationship
across their entire lifetime with only gradual change over long periods of time. One the positive side,
extraverted, agreeable, and conscientious people who are open to new experiences have happier
relationships than do those who score lower on those traits. Neurotic people are prone to anger and
anxiety, and those unhappy tendencies tend to result in touchy pessimistic, and argumentative
interactions with others. The less neurotic the partners are, the happier their marriages turn to be.
Although our personalities clearly have a genetic basis, our enduring traits can be shaped to a degree by
our relationships. Dissatisfying and abusive relationships can gradually may make us more agreeable
over time.
Self-Esteem
Our evaluations of ourselves constitute our self-esteem, and when we hold favorable judgments of our
skills and traits, our self-esteem is high; when we doubt ourselves, self-esteem is low. A theory argues
that self-esteem is a subjective gauge, a sociometer, that measures the quality of our relationship with
others. When others like us, we like ourselves; when other people regard us positively and value their
relationships with us, self-esteem is high. However, if we don’t interest others – if others seem not to
care whether or not we are part of their lives – self-esteem is low. Self-esteem operates in this manner,
according to sociometer theory, because it is an evolved mechanism that serves our need to belong. This
argument suggests that, because their reproductive success depended on staying in the tribe and being
accepted by others, early humans became sensitive to any signs of exclusion that might precede
rejection by others. Self-esteem became a psychological gauge that alerted people to declining
acceptance by others, and dislike or disinterest from others gradually caused people to dislike
themselves.
Events that involve interpersonal rejection damage our self-esteem in a way that other disappointments
do not. People who had been personally rejected felt much worse about themselves than did those
whose loss was impersonal. Public events that others witness affect people’s self-esteem more than do
private events that are otherwise identical but are known only to the individuals themselves. In this and
several other respects, whether we realize it or not, our self-evaluations seem to be much affected by
what we think others think of us.
It’s very hard to like ourselves, if others don’t like us, too. In most cases, people with chronically low self-
esteem have developed their negative self-evaluations through an unhappy history of failing to receive
sufficient acceptance and appreciation from other people. And sometimes people are victimized by
abusive relationships through no fault of their own, and, despise being likable people with fine social
skills, they develop low self-esteem as a result of mistreatment from others.
People with low self-esteem sometimes sabotage their relationship by underestimating their partners’
love for them and perceiving disregard when none exists. People with low self-regard find it hard to
believe that they are well and truly loved by their partners and, as a result, they tend not to be optimistic
that their loves will last. “Even in their closest relationships,” people with low self-esteem “typically
,harbor serious (but unwanted) insecurities about heir partners’ feelings for them”. This leads them to
overreact to their partners’ occasional bad moods, they feel more rejected, experience more hurt, and
get more angrier than do those with higher self-esteem. People with low self-esteem defensively
distance themselves, stay surly and behave badly.
Because we take large risks when we come to depend on others, close ties to an intimate partner allow
us to enjoy rich rewards of support and care, but they also leave us vulnerable to devastating betrayal
and rejection if our partners prove to be untrustworthy. Because they are confident about their partners’
love and regard for them, people with high self-esteem draw closer to their lasting doubts about their
partners’ regard and reliability, so when times get tough, they withdraw from their partners in an effort
to protect themselves. People with low self-esteem put their fragile egos before their relationships, and
that’s self-defeating when they have loving, devoted partners and there is nothing to fear.
People with low self-esteem stay on alert for signs of rejection and they wrongly perceive small bumps in
the road as worrisome signs of declining commitment in their partners. People with high self-esteem
correctly shrug off the same small bumps and remain confident of their partners’ acceptance and
positive regard. Once it is formed, low self-esteem may be hard to overcome. Relationships are more
fulfilling for both partners when they both have high self-esteem.
THE INFLUENCE OF HUMAN NATURE
Evolutionary psychology starts with three fundamental assumptions. First, sexual selection has helped
make us the species we are today. Sexual selection differs from natural selection and it involves
advantages that result in greater success at reproduction. Second, evolutionary psychology suggests that
men and women should differ from one another only to the extent that they have historically faced
different reproductive dilemmas. Thus, men and women should behave similarly in close relationships
except in those instances in which different, specialized styles of behavior would allow better access to
mates or promote superior survival of one’s offspring.
Obviously, there’s a big difference in the minimum time and effort that men and women have to invest
in each child they produce. For a man, the minimum requirement is a single ejaculation; given access to
receptive mates, a man might father hundreds of children during his lifetime. But a woman can have
children only until her menopause, and each child she has requires an enormous investment of time and
energy. These biological differences in men’s and women’s obligatory parental investment in their
children may have supported the evolution of different strategies for selecting mates. What men didn’t
offer in quality (of parenting) they could make up for in quantity (of children). Women do choose their
sexual partners more carefully than men do. They insist on smarter, friendlier, more prestigious, and
more emotionally stable partners than men will accept, and they are less interested in casual,
uncommitted sex than men are.
Woman always knows for sure whether or not a particular child is hers. A man suffers paternity
uncertainty. Perhaps because of that, even though women cheat less than men do, men are more
preoccupied with worries about their partners’ infidelity than women are.
An evolutionary perspective also makes a distinction between short-term and long-term mating
strategies. Men have a greater desire than women do for sexual liaisons of short duration; they are more
interested in brief affairs with a variety of partners, and when they enter new relationships, they’re on
the prowl, men are attracted to women who seem to be sexually available and “easy”. However, if they
think about settling down, the same men who consider promiscuous women to be desirable partners in
casual relationships often prefer chaste women as prospective spouses. When they’re thinking long-
term, men value physical attractiveness more than women do, and as men age, they marry women
increasingly younger than themselves. When women select short-term mates, they seek sexy,
,charismatic, dominant men with lots of masculine appeal. But when they evaluate potential husbands,
they look for good financial prospects, even when they aren’t good looking. In general, women care
more than men do about the financial prospects and status of their long-term partners.
A third basic assumption of evolutionary psychology is that cultural influences determine whether
evolved patterns of behavior are adaptive – and cultural change occurs faster than evolution does. But
not all of those inherited tendencies may fit the modern environments. These days, a desire for multiple
partners is probably less adaptive for men than it was millions of years ago. Conceivably, modern men
may reproduce more successfully if they display a capacity for commitment and monogamy that
encourages their partners to allow a pregnancy to occur. Sexual selection will ultimately favor styles of
behavior that fit our new environment, but it will take several thousand generations for such adaptations
to occur.
Critics of an evolutionary perspective emphasize the role of culture in shaping male and female behavior
and they contend that patterns of behavior that are presumed to be evolved tendencies are both less
noticeable and more variable across cultures than an evolutionary model would suggest. Culture
determines which behaviors are adaptive and which are not.
THE INFLUENCE OF INTERACTION
Relationships emerge from the combination of their participants’ histories and talent and those
amalgamations may be quite different from the simple sum of the individuals who create them. The
relationship two people create results from contributions from each of them but may only faintly
resemble the relationships they share with other people. Trust is a two-way street that is influenced
both by your dispositions and those of your partners. Moreover, it emerges from the dynamic give-and-
take you and your partners share each day; trust is a fluid process rather than a static, changeless thing,
and it ebbs and flows in all of your relationships.
Chapter 2: Research Methods
DEVELOPING A QUESTION
The first step in any scientific endeavor is to ask a question, and in a field like this one, some questions
emerge from personal experience. Broader social problems also suggest questions for careful study.
Questions also come from previous research. Other questions are suggested by theories. The questions
themselves are usually of two broad types. First, researchers may seek to describe events as they
naturally occur, delineating the patterns they observe as fully and accurately as they can. Alternatively,
researchers can seek to establish the causal connections between events to determine which events
have meaningful effects on subsequent outcomes and which do not.
OBTAINING PARTICIPANTS
There are two ways to recruit participants. In a convenience sample, we use anyone who is readily
available and who consents to participate. However, sometimes some specific characteristics must be
met. In a representative sample, participants resemble the entire population who are of interest.
However, people who voluntarily consent to participate in a research study may be somewhat different
from those who refuse to participate.
If we seek general principles that apply to most people, representative samples are better than
convenience samples. A convenience sample always allows the unhappy possibility that the results we
obtain are idiosyncratic, applying only to people who are just like our participants. Most relationship
studies are from cultures that are Western, well-educated, industrialized, relatively rich and democratic
(weird). People from “weird” cultures do sometimes behave differently than those who live in less
,developed nations. On the other hand, many processes studied by relationship researchers are basic
enough that they don’t differ substantially across demographic groups.
Any single study may have some imperfections, but those weakness may be answered by another study’s
strengths. No one study is perfect.
CHOOSING A DESIGN
Correlational Designs
Correlations describe patterns in which change in one event is accompanied to some degree by change
in another. If positively correlated, they go up and down together in the graph. If negatively correlated,
they change in opposite directions: as one goes up, the other does down. For example, high neuroticism
is associated with lower marital satisfaction. If uncorrelated, one of them doesn’t change in any
predictable way when the other goes up or down.
Remember that correlations tell us that two events change together in some recognizable way, but, all
by themselves, they do not tell us why that occurs. Correlational designs typically study naturally
occurring behavior without trying to influence or control the situations in which it unfolds – and the
correlations that are observed do not tell us about the causal connections between events.
Experimental Designs
Experiments provide straightforward information about causes and their effects. There is manipulation
of one or more variables and random assignment of participants. However, you can’t do experiments on
events you cannot control. So, correlational and experimental designs each have their own advantages.
With correlational designs, we can study compelling events in the real world, but correlational designs
are limited in what they can tell us about the causal relationships among events. With experimental
designs, we can examine causal connections, but we are limited in what we can study.
SELECTING A SETTING
The usual choices include (a) a laboratory or (b) a natural, everyday environment. Either choice has
advantages and disadvantages. The lab offers the advantage of greater control over extraneous,
unwanted influences, but it may elicit artificial behavior that differs from what people usually do. Natural
settings offer the advantage of obtaining more typical behavior, but they can be full of distractions and
hard to manage. Some behaviors are difficult to study because they are rare, or unpleasant, or very
intimate (or all three). One way to overcome these difficulties is to have subjects role-play the behavior
we’re trying to understand. Role-play studies vary in how realistic they are. At one extreme, participants
may be asked to read a story involving the relevant behavior and to imagine those events happening to
them. Such scenarios are always less vivid than the real events would be, and they allow people to
respond in a cool, collected fashion that may be quite different from the impulsive and emotional
reactions they display when such events really take place. At the other extreme, studies known as
simulations ask people to act out a particular role in a hypothetical situation. But people may do what
they think they should do in these situations rather than what they really would do if the events actually
occurred.
THE NATURE OF OUR DATA
Two major types of research measures are (a) people’s own reports and (b) observations.
Self-Reports
In self-reports, we ask about their experiences. They allow us to “get inside people’s heads” and
, understand personal points of view that may not be apparent to outside observers. It is inexpensive and
easy to obtain. However, there are three potential problems to worry about.
-Participants’ Interpretations of the Questions
-Difficulties in Recall or Awareness
-Bias in Participant’s Reports:
People may be reluctant to tell researchers anything that makes them look bad or that portray them in
an undesirable light. This can cause a social desirability bias, or distortion that results from people’s
wishes to make good impressions on others.
Observations
Event-sampling is a method that uses intermittent, short periods of observation to capture samples of
behavior that actually occur over longer periods of time; investigations may randomly sample short
spans of time when a target behavior is likely to occur, scattering periods of observation through
different times on different days. Observations can take several forms. Researchers sometimes make
ratings that characterize the events they witness in relatively global terms. For example, an argument
might be rated with regard to the extent to which it is “constructive and problem solving” or
“argumentative and hostile”. Alternatively, observers may employ coding procedures that focus on very
specific behaviors such as the amount of time people speak during an interaction, the number of smiles
they display, or the number of times they touch each other. Observational research can also suffer from
the problem of reactivity: People may change their behavior when they know they are being observed.
Physiological Measures
Physiological measures are often expensive.
Archival Materials
Historical archives are valuable sources of data about relationships, and when these are dated, they
become “archival” information.
THE ETHICS OF SUCH ENDEAVORS
Relationship science presents important ethical dilemmas. Just asking people to fill out questionnaires
describing their relationships may have unintended effects on those partnerships. Researchers’ innocent
inquiries may alert people to relationship problems or frustrations they didn’t know they had.
Simulations and other observational studies may have even more impact. Relationship science is based
in compassionate concern for the well-being of its participants.
INTERPRETING AND INTEGRATING RESULTS
Paired, interdependent data. Responses obtained from relationship partners that are often
interdependent, and special statistical procedures are advisable for analyzing such data.
Three sources of influence. Furthermore, relationships emerge from the individual contributions of the
separate partners and from the unique effects of how they combine as a pair. Relationship researchers
often encounter phenomena that result from the combination of all three of these influences, the two
individual partners and the idiosyncratic partnership they share.
Meta-analyses are studies that statistically combine the results from several prior studies. If the prior
studies all produce basically the same result, the meta-analysis makes that plain; if there are
discrepancies, the meta-analysis may reveal why.
