The Psychology of Relationships

Julia Willerton

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781350312623
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Personality in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Relationships are central to our lives, influencing our health, sense of identity and happiness. In this accessible introduction, Willerton looks at how we develop and maintain relationships, piecing together insights that span health, social interaction, evolutionary origins and developmental psychology. Whatever your level of study or interest, this engaging discussion reveals how psychology can enhance your understanding of personal relationships.

Chapter 1

Studying relationships: perspectives and methods

Introduction

For many people, relationships with others are one of the most important aspects, if not the most important aspect of life. They are often associated with our greatest feelings of happiness and when they go wrong, they can cause heartache and pain. They also occupy a good deal of our time: if we are not thinking and talking about relationships, mulling over what we said – and what we could have said – we are discussing the relationships of celebrities or watching films and reading books in which relationships are portrayed. In 2009, over 15 million people in the UK were single and over half of these were actively looking for a long-term relationship. A substantial 4.5 million UK residents visited a dating website at some point in 2008 (Society Matters, 2009).

In this book, we are going to explore what psychological research has discovered about personal relationships. What are relationships? A widely used definition was given by Argyle and Henderson (1985: 4) as a ‘regular social encounter over a period of time’. This definition captures some important aspects of relationships: they occur over a period of time, although some are much shorter than others. They involve regular contact or interaction between two people. Personal relationships – the focus of this book – are those that are romantic and/or sexual in nature.

In this chapter we are going to introduce some of the methods psychologists have used to study relationships, along with the important perspectives in this field. These perspectives include the dominant type of social psychology, called experimental social psychology. We will consider some of the challenges and criticisms of this approach and the new, qualitative approaches to studying relationships that are being put forward by critical social psychology. We will also consider the insights into relationships offered by other branches of psychology.

This chapter will cover:

An introduction to the main perspectives in the study of personal relationships and the methods associated with each of these perspectives:

Experimental social psychology

Evolutionary social psychology

Developmental social psychology

Health psychology

The main challenges to social psychology:

The criticisms posed by critical social psychology

The emergence of qualitative research methods

The need for a cross-cultural social psychology

The need for research into understudied relationships

Putting it all together: studying relationships

Studying personal relationships

The study of personal relationships has traditionally belonged to the branch of social psychology. Social psychology has been defined as ‘the scientific investigation of how the thoughts, feelings and behaviours of individuals are influenced by the actual, imagined or implied presence of others’ (Allport, 1935 cited in Hogg and Vaughan, 2005: 4).

Modern social psychology includes a number of different perspectives (sometimes called approaches) that can be used to study social behaviour in general and personal relationships in particular. These perspectives are best seen as meta-theories as they generally include a number of smaller theories within them. Each perspective provides a specific way of looking at relationships and makes different assumptions about what aspects of people and relationships should be studied and how this might best be done. The most influential of these is experimental social psychology.

Relationships are not solely studied by social psychologists but also considered by many other branches of psychology as well as other disciplines such as sociology. Over the past twenty years, three branches of psychology have provided us with important insight into specific aspects of human relationships. Evolutionary social psychology has considered how relationships today may have their origins in the distant past. Developmental social psychology has looked for links between childhood experiences and later relationships in adulthood. Health psychology has considered the ways in which relationships affect our emotional and physical well-being. We will start by considering how each of these perspectives approaches the study of relationships.

Experimental social psychology

Since the late 1970s, experimental social psychology (sometimes known as cognitive social psychology) has been ‘the dominant perspective in social psychology’ (Hogg and Vaughan, 2005: 22). It dominates most university departments, articles in journals and the research field overall. Experimental social psychology grew out of behaviourism in the middle of the twentieth century as researchers working within a behaviourist framework acknowledged that cognitive processes, such as thoughts and beliefs, affected how people behaved in social situations.

Experimental social psychology takes the view that people are primarily thinkers. They interpret other people and think carefully about their relationships, weighing them up and evaluating them. Social exchange theory, which you will meet in Chapter 5, fits into this category. Social exchange theory takes the view that people keep an eye on their relationships in a similar way to their bank accounts! They compare them with other, previous relationships in terms of enjoyment and they may also compare them with how they were in the past. People are said to weigh up the rewards or reinforcements they get from relationships as well as the bad things – such as arguments or jealousy – to see if a relationship is worth continuing or to decide whether it is time to get out.

Methods

The methods used by experimental social psychologists are quantitative and scientific. In the 1960s and 70s researchers made considerable use of laboratory experiments. Many of these early experiments were focused on very specific behaviours involved in relationships, such as initial attraction (see, for example, Byrne’s ‘Bogus Stranger’ studies in Chapter 4) but made little attempt to study relationships in their social context or to follow them over longer periods of time to see how they developed. These methods received considerable criticism for focusing on ‘isolated slices of relationships’ (Miell and Dallos, 1996: 3). The realization that research needed to see how relationships changed, rather than studying them in snapshots, led to a move towards longitudinal research studies which followed relationships over a much longer period of time.

Today, experimental social psychologists have retained their quantitative framework but often collect data outside the laboratory setting. Methods include field experiments, which involve the manipulation of an independent variable in a real life setting, and quasi-experiments, in which naturally occurring independent variables are assessed to see their effects on dependent variables. Experimental social psychologists also make use of correlation to study relationships. This method involves measuring two or more variables to see if there is a pattern or relationship between them. Correlation is useful to researchers as it helps them to study areas where random allocation to conditions is difficult or impossible. It also avoids many of the ethical issues associated with experimentation. A detailed example of the use of correlation in relationship research is shown below.

Thinking scientifically → A correlational approach to
studying equity in couples (Van Yperen and Buunk, 1990)

In a correlational study, researchers measure two or more variables and see if there is a pattern or relationship between them. Van Yperen and Buunk (1990) have attempted to establish if fairness in a relationship (known as equity) is associated with how happy and satisfied couples are with each other. Clearly, it would be difficult to study this area using a true experiment, as researchers could not randomly allocate participants to conditions by putting some in an unfair relationship. The use of quasi-experimental research would also pose some ethical problems. Couples in unfair or unhappy relationships may be reluctant to take part or distressed by being asked to think about their relationship. For these reasons, Van Yperen and Buunk carried out a study measuring feelings of equity in couples’ relationships and feelings of satisfaction with the relationship. These were the two co-variables.

Van Yperen and Buunk selected a sample of 736 people, made up of 259 married couples and 109 cohabiting couples; 70% of the couples had children. Feelings of equity were measured using an anonymous questionnaire which participants were asked to complete and return without discussion with their partner. Equity was assessed at two points called Time 1 and Time 2, exactly one year apart, making this study longitudinal. Couples were also asked to indicate their satisfaction with the relationship using an eight-item scale with four positive and four negative statements at both time intervals. The scores on these two variables were correlated to see if a pattern or relationship existed between them.

Van Yperen and Buunk found that equity at Time 1 correlated with satisfaction with the relationship at Time...