Understanding and altering the longitudinal course of intimate partnerships.

• Author: Bradbury, Thomas N.

Abstract

Basic psychological research on couples and families can be valuable in informing social policies and interventions. This article provides an overview of recent research addressing factors that contribute to satisfying and enduring adult partnerships. Surprisingly, evidence linking communication between intimate partners to the outcome of their relationships has been weak and counterintuitive. This has prompted several new lines of research on how intimate relationships change. Recent findings reviewed here highlight the value of (a) expanding conceptions of intimate communication by considering how social support and positive emotional expressions moderate the effects of problem-solving skills on changes in relationship quality, (b) examining partners' personal strengths and vulnerabilities as antecedents of aggression and hostile interaction, and (c) recognising the central role of chronic circumstances and acute stress in governing fluctuations in partners' judgements of relationship quality. The implications of these findings for strengthening intimate partnerships are outlined.

INTRODUCTION

Consider the data shown in Figure 1, which come from a couple participating in a longitudinal study of intimate relationships. The vertical axis represents self-reported relationship satisfaction scores as assessed with the Quality Marriage Index (Norton 1983), and the horizontal axis represents the number of days that have elapsed since the couple's wedding. These partners, who were recruited from public records, provided eight independent reports of their relationship satisfaction at approximately six-month intervals, beginning within six months of their marriage. Additional reports of satisfaction were collected in the last trimester of the first pregnancy and shortly after the arrival of the first child, an event that is indicated in the figure by a thick vertical line. Figure 1, therefore, shows how the man and woman's 10 reports of satisfaction change over a period of about 1,500 days, or approximately four years. More specifically, we can see that the relationship satisfaction scores for this couple:

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

* are above the scale midpoint at the first assessment but, nevertheless, well below the maximum possible score of 45

* generally trend downward, particularly for the woman, who achieves the lowest possible score of 6 after approximately four years of marriage

* demonstrate upward and downward fluctuations.

The focus on the first four years of marriage is not arbitrary, but was chosen for analysis because marital dissolution is most likely to occur during this period in the United States (see Bradbury 1998) and because it is a time in which many couples are forming parenting partnerships and raising one or more young children.

Imagine that you encountered this couple, as they were formalising their relationship, back in 1993 when they provided the first data points in this figure. If you are a researcher, this may be one of the couples visiting your laboratory or responding to a survey you are conducting. If you are a practitioner, this couple may be participating in a workshop you are offering to enhance relationship communication. If you are a policy maker, this may be one of the thousands of couples marrying or otherwise forming a parenting partnership in your region in this particular year.

Although Figure 1 shows how relationship satisfaction ebbs and flows over a significant period of time in a developing relationship, we never have access to this information when we first make contact with couples in recently formed partnerships. However, by seeing the way in which future reports of satisfaction will evolve over time for this couple, researchers, practitioners and policy makers alike are prompted to ask:

* What concepts would prove most valuable for understanding this partnership?

* What variables might we want to track from the very start of partnership, or perhaps even earlier, to anticipate and explain how it evolves?

* What would we want to know to explain the degree of satisfaction that the partners experienced when their partnership began, and to explain how their satisfaction changed over time?

* How can we achieve an understanding of change in relationship satisfaction that might be applicable to all kinds of couples?

We would want to know the answers to these questions, in part because they capture a fascinating scientific puzzle. However, we would also strive to answer these questions because doing so would allow us to address with greater sophistication yet another question:

* What strategies can we develop, and what specific steps can we take, to increase the chances that this couple and all couples will have stronger relationships?

These questions are by no means new and, in fact, for decades they have served as a kind of a touchstone for gauging progress in the field, serving both to clarify the extent to which basic empirical findings inform intervention and to determine the extent to which available interventions are rooted in the empirical literature. Revisiting these questions now takes on special significance for several reasons. First, although marriage is generally a stable enterprise in New Zealand (e.g. 83% of the couples married in 1989 were married in 1999), 2003 witnessed the highest number of divorces in the country since 1982 (see www.stats.govt.nz). Second, the vast majority of interventions offered to couples in developing relationships have not been rigorously tested with well-controlled experiments, long follow-up intervals, at-risk populations and independent replication of effects. Some interventions designed to teach couples skills in communication and problem solving show promise (e.g. Hahlweg et al. 1998). However, recent evidence that couples at relatively low risk for adverse outcomes are better off in a minimally directed group discussion of a book on relationships than in a structured five-session skill-based programme (Halford et al. 2001) suggests that more complex models of intervention may be necessary. Finally, at the same time, research on marriage has evolved beyond cross-sectional comparisons of maritally distressed and satisfied couples to use longitudinal designs to examine possible processes by which marriages develop and change from their earliest point forward.

The purpose of this article is to offer a focused analysis of recent longitudinal research on marriage, with the aim of drawing out the implications of this work for devising strategies to alter the longitudinal course of committed relationships. We emphasise the implications of this research specifically for preventive and educational interventions, on the grounds that basic research has far greater relevance to these interventions than it does to tertiary interventions. This is because interventions undertaken after the onset of relationship distress must contend not only with the factors that led to the distress, but also with the individual and interpersonal consequences that result from the distress (see Bradbury et al. 1998). This analysis focuses heavily on our own studies, although we link our work to related findings in the literature. More inclusive summaries of research on marriage can be found in reviews by Bradbury et al. (2000), Christensen and Heavey (1999), Fincham and Beach (1999) and Halford et al. (2003).

So where do we focus first in our quest to understand and help the couple in Figure 1, around the time their partnership is formalised? We will begin where Harold Raush and colleagues began in their classic work Communication, Conflict, and Marriage (1974), when they asserted that:

Studying what people say about themselves is no substitute for studying how they behave ... Questionnaires and scales of marital satisfaction and dissatisfaction have yielded very little. We need to look at what people do with one another. (p.5) The ensuing emphasis on observational analysis of communication between partners--particularly communication over conflicts and differences of opinion--would soon come to dominate the psychological study of long-term partnerships. Researchers working from the perspective of social learning theory embraced this method and organised their studies around the premise that:

Distress, in this model, is assumed to be a function of couples' interaction patterns. Inevitably, couples have wants and needs that conflict. Distress results from couples' aversive and ineffectual responses to conflict. When conflicts arise, one or both partners may respond aversively by nagging, complaining, distancing, or becoming violent until the other gives in, creating a coercive cycle that each partner contributes to and maintains. (Koerner and Jacobson 1994:207) Modification of these interactional patterns was undertaken, in turn, as a means of treating (Jacobson and Margolin 1979) and preventing (Markman and Floyd 1980) relationship dysfunction. In the first section below we evaluate the social learning perspective as a foundation for preventive interventions, followed by sections in which we consider two additional factors--the individual strengths and vulnerabilities that spouses bring to their partnership, and the stressful events and circumstances that spouses and couples encounter--that are likely to affect interpersonal repertoires in committed partnerships and the trajectory of relationship satisfaction. In evaluating all of the work presented here, it is important to bear in mind that findings from couples in North America may not generalise well to couples in New Zealand; studies are needed to test this assumption directly. Nevertheless, it seems plausible that the three broad domains outlined here--interactional processes, partners' individual strengths and vulnerabilities, and stressful events and circumstances--influence the course of committed partnerships in a wide range of settings.

INTERACTIONAL PROCESSES AND CHANGE IN...