Relationship science
[6] In the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, researchers such as John Bowlby, Harry Harlow, Robert Hinde, and Mary Ainsworth began pursuing the study of mother–infant attachment.
[7] In 1949, Reuben Hill developed the ABC-X model, which is a theoretical framework used to examine how families manage and adapt to crises given the resources they have.
[12][13][14] Yet, their work went beyond just attraction and began to explore other domains such as the processes of choosing a romantic partner and falling in love, and the centrality of relationships in human health and well-being.
[11] In 1974, their work came under fire after the senator of Wisconsin at the time alleged their research was a waste of taxpayer dollars, in light of Berscheid receiving $84,000 from the National Science Foundation to study love.
[11] Despite this immense scrutiny, they nevertheless persisted in pioneering the nascent field of relationship science through the 1970s and into the 1980s through seminal developments such as the distinction between passionate and companionate love and a scale to measure the former.
Urie Bronfenbrenner's late 1970s and mid-1980s social–ecological model established key principles that researchers would eventually use ubiquitously to study the impact of socio-contextual factors on relationships.
[25] Also in the 1980s and into the 1990s, Toni Antonucci began exploring friendships and social support among adults,[26] while Arthur Aron was examining the role of relationships with romantic partners, siblings, friends, and parents in individual self-expansion.
The first international conference specifically dedicated to relationship processes took place in 1977 in Swansea, Wales, hosted by Mark Cook (a social psychologist) and Glen Wilson (a psychotherapist).
[34] In 1982, the first of the eventually bi-annual International Conference of Personal Relationships (ICPR) took place in Madison, Wisconsin, under the direction of Robin Gilmour and Steve Duck, with about 100 attendees.
[11][37]: 262 However, she also discussed the shortcomings that were stifling the progress of the field, and provided specific advice for overcoming such limitations in the upcoming century.
[29][37]: 261 Additionally, she stressed the dire need of the field to inform public opinion and policy related specifically to intimate relationship stability (e.g., quality, dissolution/divorce)—at the time, a hotly debated topic informed by partisan politics rather than empirical evidence, and for scientists to place greater emphasis on the environments in which relationships operate.
[38][39] The year 2000 included new developments in the field such as Nancy Collins and Brooke Feeney's work on partner support-seeking and caregiving in romantic relationships from an attachment theory perspective,[40] and Reis, Sheldon, Gable, and colleagues' article "Daily Well-being: The Role of Autonomy, Competence, & Relatedness".
[41] A couple of years later, Rena Repetti, Shelley Taylor, and Teresa Seaman published work that addressed some of Berscheid's 1999 article concerns as well as used health psychology perspectives to inform relationship science.
[42] They empirically demonstrated the negative effects of family home environments with significant conflict and aggression on the mental and physical health of individuals in both childhood and adulthood.
In 2004, after previously unsuccessful attempts, ISSPR and INPR merged to form the International Association for Relationship Research (IARR).
Eli Finkel, Paul Eastwick, Benjamin Karney, Harry Reis, and Susan Sprecher wrote an article discussing the impact of online dating on relationship formation and both its positive and negative implications for relationship outcomes compared to traditional offline dating.
[39] The field recognizes that, for two individuals to be in the most basic form of a social relationship, they must be interdependent—that is, have interconnected behaviors and mutual influence on one another.
[25][47] This asserts that a close relationship is "one of strong, frequent, and diverse interdependence that lasts over a considerable period of time".
[2][10] Even though Kelley and Thibaut's intent was to discuss the theory as it applied to groups, they began by exploring the effects of mutual influence as it pertains to two people together (i.e., a dyad).
[20][58] Coercion theory focuses on why people end up in and stay in unhealthy relationships by explaining that individuals unintentionally reinforce each other's bad behaviors.
[1][2][20] Influential people who have studied close and intimate relationships from an attachment perspective include Nancy Collins, Jeffry Simpson, and Chris Fraley.
Nancy Collins and Stephen Read (1990) developed one of the most widely cited and used scales assessing adult attachment styles and, additionally, their dimensions.
[63] Evolutionary psychology as it pertains to relationship science is a collection of theories that aim to understand mating behaviors as a product of our ancestral past and adaptation.
[1][20] This set of perspectives has a common thread that links the modern-day study of relationship processes and behaviors to adaptive responses and features that were developed to maximize reproductive fitness.
[2][20] The first level is the microsystem, which contains the single, immediate context people or dyads (e.g., couple, parent-child, friends) directly find themselves in—such as a home, school, or work.
[17] Finally, the chronosystem is the broadest level that is specifically the dimension of time as it relates to an individual's context changes and life events.
[20] However, a common concern with experimental study of relationship phenomena is the potential lack of generalizability of laboratory setting findings to real-world contexts.
[11][20] This method enables researchers to study aspects of a relationship that may be sub-conscious to participants or would otherwise not be detectable through self-report measures.
[37][38] In 2006, David Kenny, Deborah Kashy, and William Cook published the book Dyadic Data Analysis, which has been widely cited as a tool of understanding and measuring non-independence.
[76] This book includes information and instructions on using MLM, SEM, and other statistical methods to study both between and within dyad phenomena.
