The Formation of Healthy, Stable Romantic Relationships During Young Adulthood: A Developmental and Dyadic Perspective

The purpose of this study is to expand our ongoing longitudinal study (study 88-CH-32) by gathering information about romantic partnerships from both the longitudinal study s now young adult target children, who were 5 months old when the study began and are now as old as 23 years of age, and their significant others. Because the target children are approaching the age when they form lasting romantic relationships, we wish to track these partnerships as they form. With these data, we will be uniquely suited to identify how key individual and inter-personal factors at distinct points of development (i.e., childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood) influence the formation of stable, emotionally intimate, mutually dependent romantic relationships during young adulthood. In particular, we aim to disentangle the influence of childhood and adolescent interpersonal experiences in other relational spheres (i.e., relationships with parents and friends) from the influence of contemporary characteristics of both members of the romantic dyad. As part of our examination, in addition to relationship quality, we focus on the strength of each dyad member s attachment to his or her parents as well as each other, thereby allowing for the examination of attachment transfer, an important yet understudied characteristic of successful romantic relationship formation.

Only cohabiting (whether married or otherwise) young-adult romantic dyads that include a target child from our existing longitudinal study (dyad N equals 250; 500 young adults overall, all volunteers) will be eligible to participate in this new data collection. By limiting eligibility in this way, we will have data extending back to infancy for one member of each young-adult romantic dyad. All data collected will be collected via a secure, password-protected website.

As part of our on-going longitudinal study, we already collected (or will collect) individual information from the young adult target children (mental health, attachment style, attachment strength, personality, substance use). We propose here to collect complementary individual information from the significant others of young adult target children as well as dyad-level information (relationship satisfaction and household functioning) from both members of the cohabiting romantic dyad. Combined with existing data from our longitudinal study, these new data will enable us to move beyond most current research focused on the developmental antecedents of successful young adult romantic relationships and examine how an individual s past interpersonal experiences interplay with the contemporary characteristics of both young-adult romantic dyad members to influence the state of the romantic dyad.