The Emerging Field of Personal Relationships

Robin Gilmour, Steve Duck, Robin Gilmour, Steve Duck

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367757861
• eBook ISBN: 9781000379174
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Originally published in 1986, this book is a result of the first International Conference on Personal Relationships held in 1982. The conference itself was a significant event in publicly bringing together major figures whose work was starting to define the new area of personal relationships. The chapters are arranged to follow the structure of the conference program, with major opening and closing discussions covering the whole field and the rest of the chapters grouped under the headings of Depiction and Taxonomy of Relationships; Development and Growth of Relationships and Disorder and Repair of Relationships. The result is by no means a comprehensive treatment of the field, but the editors hoped that the book highlighted significant issues in personal relationship research as well as some excellent examples of the ways in which issues and problems were being tackled at the time. They also hoped that it would have an effect on the future development of the field of personal relationships by indicating its value and potential.

I

INTRODUCTION AND OVERVIEW

1

Personal Relationships: Their Nature and Significance

Harold H. Kelley

University of California, Los Angeles

DOI: 10.4324/9781003164005-2

This chapter describes the present status of the field of “personal relationships,” emphasizes some of the important facts in which research on personal relationships is anchored, and highlights some of the issues the field faces. Consequently, I briefly summarize (1) the significance of the Madison Conference, (2) the significance of personal relationships, (3) the nature of what I think personal relationships are, and (4) scientific versus popular thought about personal relationships. Each of these topics relates to the others, so ideally they should be developed all at once. However, the linear structure of verbal communication requires that they be taken up in some order and I have chosen the one above.

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE MADISON CONFERENCE

The Conference dealt with important practical psychological and social problems (such as loneliness, alternative life styles, and sexual satisfaction) and raised crucial scientific questions about such phenomena as social roles, power, social motivation, and perception. However, I believe that this was more than just another exciting conference; I believe that we participated in one of several collective activities by which a new field of science is being formed. We took part in the emergence of a new science—the science of interpersonal relationships.

I refer to “several collective activities” of which this Conference was one. The other activities that can be viewed as contributing to this new science are well known but worth mentioning here. A partial listing would include a number of recent publications such as Swensen’s textbook, Interpersonal Relations (1973), Huston’s edited volume Foundations of Interpersonal Attraction (1974), Duck’s volume on Theory and Practice in Interpersonal Attraction (1977a), Levinger and Raush’s edited volume on Close Relationships (1977), Triandis’ book, Interpersonal Behavior (1977), Burgess and Huston’s collection on exchange theories and relationship development (1979), the recent Duck and Gilmour series entitled Personal Relationships {198 la, 1981b, 1981c, and Duck, 1982), and Robert Hinde’s important overview, Towards Understanding Relationships (1979). These are some of the recent works that take relationships as their focal topic, draw together a variety of facts about them, and try to develop systematic understandings—not of individuals but of relationships. In doing this, these works typically draw on literatures from diverse disciplines and specialties. The writings are, of course, deeply rooted in the literature on the family that has developed over many years within sociology and, within social work, in the field of family and marital counseling. Within psychology, there has recently been important research in the specialities of clinical and developmental psychology—research on marital relations, parent-child interaction, and most recently, peer relations among children. The most remarkable advances within both of these specialities have been made through research in which actual, natural interaction has been closely observed and analyzed statistically in order to identify pattemings of interaction. This is illustrated by the research on family interaction by Patterson (1982) and others at Oregon, the work reported by Gottman in his book Marital Interaction (1979b), and the studies of mother-infant interaction by Ainsworth and Bell (1969), Brazelton, Koslowski, and Main (1974), Bruner (1975), Kaye (1977), and many others.

The recent focus on interpersonal relations is also partly rooted in social psychology. Here, the interest derives in the first place from the tradition of attitudes and attitude measurement. About 10 years ago, the work on interpersonal attraction shifted from the study of positive attitudes between strangers to the study of people in love, as illustrated by Rubin’s development of the “love scale” (1970, 1973) and Berscheid and Walster’s research on passionate love (1974). A second origin within social psychology has been the small group field from which there have been extensions to interpersonal relations of ideas about cooperation, competition, and conflict resolution, as in Kressel and Deutsch’s writings on divorce (1977), and Kelley and Thibaut on Interpersonal Relations(1978). Finally, various ideas in cognitive social psychology have been brought to bear on personal relationships, as in Walster’s research on equity (e.g., Walster, Walster, & Traupmann, 1978), which is an offshoot of cognitive dissonance theory, and in the emphasis in my Personal Relationships book (Kelley, 1979) on attributional processes and conflicts. Along with these more theory-based; efforts, there are a number of research areas that derive from current social concerns and practical issues, such as loneliness (Peplau & Perlman, 1982), female and male interaction (Henley, 1977), and so-called “alternative” forms of relationships such as cohabitation and homosexual relations (Peplau and Gordon, 1983).

From this brief list, we can see that our field draws its ideas and data from a broad range of behavioral science disciplines and specialties. Also, as the title of our Conference suggests, our field can accurately be described as an international one.

These developments—within sociology, social work, clinical and developmental psychology, and social psychology—have led some of us to believe that it is now desirable to have personal relationships recognized as a special field. During recent years, a group of us have been reviewing and organizing the field with this goal in mind. Our work has culminated in a volume entitled Close Relationships (Kelley, Berscheid, Christensen, Harvey, Huston, Levinger, Mc-Clintock, Peplau, & Peterson, 1983). One of the purposes of this book is to make a case for “close relationships” as a field of specialization within psychology, coordinate with, say, developmental, perception, or personality. We regard a focus on close relationships as an important and basic one for psychology, and we see coordinated work on relationships as a meaningful way to restore contact among certain areas of psychology, such as clinical, developmental, personality, and social, that presently are much too compartmentalized.

Not incompatible with that goal is the more ambitious one of establishing “interpersonal relationships” as a field of science coordinate with its parent disciplines sociology and psychology. It is some of the implications of that goal that I now wish to highlight.

By asserting that the field of interpersonal relations is emerging as a new science, we imply first that the phenomena of personal relationships are unique. The phenomena of relationships are distinctive from those studied in neighboring domains of science. To simplify our consideration of this matter, let us fit personal relationships into the hierarchy of science at a location between the sciences concerned with society, on the one hand, and those concerned with the person, on the other hand, as suggested in Fig. 1.1. When we describe relationship phenomena as unique, we mean that they consist of processes and properties not found at the levels studied by the sciences of society or the sciences of the person. The interaction patterns, the conflict resolution styles, the informal normative controls, the reward and cost sharing agreements, the shared views of the world, etc. that characterize a relationship are not phenomena of either its constituent individuals or its social environment.

FIG. 1.1. The phenomena of personal relationships located relative to the phenomena of society and person.

The reason for this distinctiveness of relationship phenomena is found in the configuration of causal connections shown in Fig. 1.1. The personal relationship is (1) affected by personal and societal factors, but it also (2) has its own internal dynamics (the arrows within the relationship) and (3) affects both the personal and the social levels (arrows directed outward from the relationship). Thus, a marriage is affected by the needs and abilities of the two spouses, but it also affects them. There is dynamic interaction between the two persons that changes those properties or modifies their expression. Young lovers are affected by their social environment (e.g., their in-laws), but at the same time, depending on the influence they have on each other in their interaction, they modify the way their social environment acts on them.

From this we see that personal relationships are not the mere creatures of their personal and social milieus. By virtue of their internal dynamics and their feedback effects on the external personal and social factors, personal relationships manifest a distinctive level of phenomena. Relationship phenomena are, in principle, no more explained by society and persons than social and personal phenomena are explained by relationships.

From these observations, it follows that the field of personal relationships is not simply a marginal field, standing at the borders or at the intersection of several parent fields. It is a separate field in its own right, with its own set of phenomena and issues.

Second, when we consider personal relationships as a new science, we imply that it is needed by the other, neighboring sciences. This implication reflects our belief that the phenomena we study play an important causal role in relation to those investigated in other disciplines. As the causal arrows in Fig. 1.1 show, not only are relationships not simply the creatures of social and personal factors, they importantly affect those factors. Psychological structures and processes are partly determined by personal relationships. Similarly, social structure and process are partly determined by personal relationships. Consequently, knowledge of the phenomena of relationships is essential to a full understanding of how both individuals and social organizations develop, function, and change.

Figure 1.1 is not meant to suggest that all the causal linkage between society and person is by way of personal relationships. However, it does suggest that the most important society-person linkages are mediated by relationships. An important implication of this view is that understanding how society affects the person or how the person affects society requires that we understand the internal dynamics of personal relationships. For example, during economic depression, the ways in which people’s changing needs or levels of frustration affect their communities depends on the specific interaction processes within families and peer groups. It is these processes—the discussion, the joint decisions, the shared interpretations of the situation—that greatly affect how people will attempt to gain and use various economic resources, whether and how they will vote, whether and how they will take to the streets in public demonstrations, and so on. Similarly, the effects on each person of major social changes (the “downward” arrows in Figure 1.1) depend on the relevant interaction within his/her personal relationships. With loss of employment, the degree to which a person experiences physical and mental symptoms depends on specific features of interaction with family and friends, such as the causal interpretations they provide, their material and moral support, and the problem solutions they offer and facilitate. To repeat, the understanding of both person-to-society and society-to-person causal links requires our investigating the details of the mediating links provided by the interaction within personal relationships.

There is a third implication of our thinking of “personal relationships” as a new field of science: There are systematic laws to be discovered that apply over a variety of specific types of relationships. Many different relationships qualify as “personal” relations, for example, those between lovers, those in marriage and cohabitation arrangements, those within families between parents and children, between brothers and sisters, and between relatives and kinfolk, those between close friends in school, those at work between close co-workers, and so on. At one level, a conference on personal relationships consists of a loose collection of researchers and practitioners interested in various particular types of relationships. However, at a more basic level, and implied in our thinking of ourselves as forming a new science, we are a group of workers involved in the highly cooperative activity of identifying the phenomena and laws that cut across these various kinds of relationships. These are the general phenomena and the broad principles of formation, development, power, dependence, conflict, coordination, and so on that can be observed in many or all personal relations.

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF PERSONAL RELATIONSHIPS

Much of the foregoing discussion suggests the significance of personal relationships. In Fig. 1.1, the diagram of the personal relation as its stands between society and person is one characterization of its significance. The personal relationship is shown to form part of the causal interface whereby society affects the individual and the individual, in turn, affects society. This general view of the significance of personal relationships is easily accepted. It is a readily observable fact that individuals exist in and take part in society primarily in clusters or small groups. A drive through any community, a visit to the market, a Sunday afternoon stroll in the park, a TV news report on a refugee camp—all of these experiences and many more show us that people live, work, buy, relax, migrate, go to war, and survive catastrophes in small tight-knit groups, primarily families. These personally interrelated clusters are the primary units out of which social organizations are constructed and by which social processes are carried.

However, there are some crucial qualitative and quantitative distinctions we have to make. First, we must determine, for various specific types of relationships, the precise roles they play in this mediation. In what respects and to what degrees does a particular type of relationship affect the individual, as compared with, say, the direct connections between social organizations and individuals of the sort provided by school teachers, social workers, or the mass media? And in what ways do personal relationships mediate even these “direct” connections, for example, highlighting, interpreting, and evaluating the information from the TV news by discussing it within the family circle? This kind of question calls to mind the line of research that goes back to the pioneering work of Katz and Lazarsfeld (1955) on mass media versus personal influence and that extends to Ward, Wackman, and Wortella’s 1977 book, How Children Learn to Buy.

Second, there are some quantitative aspects of the personal relationship mediation that require careful analysis. These quantitative aspects are more readily seen if we expand our society-relationship-person diagram to reflect differences between the levels in their numerosity. Each social organization includes a number of relationships and each relationship includes a number of persons. Several different aggregation or combination problems are then involved. There is the problem of how effects to and from the different relationships linked to a given social organization are aggregated or combined across relationships, and there is the parallel problem for each of the personal relationships of how the effects to and from its different members are aggregated or combined across the members. In addition, there are further temporal aggregation problems that crosscut those mentioned here. These problems have to do with the cumulative impact of each causal link over time. And, of course, the picture is further complicated if we take account of the different types of personal relationships that link a given social organization to a given population of individuals, there again being problems of their combined or aggregate effects.

One or more of these facets of aggregate or cumulative effects enters into all of our significant generalizations about personal relationships. To illustrate these aggregation problems, let us consider a community church, the various families that constitute its congregation, and the many members of these families. From the church’s perspective, the personal relationships are significant because through their respective cumulative effects on their members, effects achieved through consistent patterns of interaction, most or all of each family’s members may develop religious practices and behaviors that support the church. Furthermore, it is important for the church that these effects be achieved with some uniformity across the various families. Thus, each family unit must have a marked cumulative impact on its children and this impact becomes important at the social level insofar as it is replicated over a large number of families. Similar analysis can be made of the manner in which families link their members to the welfare system, adolescent gangs link their members to the criminal justice system, dating relationships link their members to the popular music culture, and married couples link their members to the world of work.

Personal relationships gain their significance from their cumulative effects. From the perspective of the individual, relationships provide interaction that occurs over a considerable period of time and is characterized by frequent and intense experiences. If the frequent and intense events of any stable personal relationship are consistently patterned, it has great psychological significance for the development and stability or change of the individuals. From the perspective of society, personal relationships are important not only for their effectiveness in shaping individual propensities but for the uniformity with which large numbers of similar relationships do so. Personal relations are significant to society, then, insofar as there are many relationships of a certain type and there is uniformity among those of that type in their effects on their members and environments.

To summarize, from both a psychological and a social perspective, the significance of personal relationships derives from their cumulative, aggregate effects. Relationships are common, they are often of long duration, they exercise strong and generally consistent influence, they are numerous within each type, and they often exhibit uniformity within type.

It is perhaps not too digressive here to point out that this conception of the significance of personal relationships has important implications for our research designs. To properly reflect their significance—to document, assess, or describe their aggregate consequences—our ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Contents Page
• Contributors Page
• Preface Page
• Part I. Introduction and Overview
• Part II. Depiction and Taxonomy of Relationships
• Part III. Development and Growth of Relationships
• Part IV. Disorder and Repair of Relationships
• Part V. Summary and Perspective
• References
• Author Index
• Subject Index