Sliding vs Deciding: Scott Stanley's Blog: Does Relationship/Marriage Education Work with Participants who have Low Incomes and/or with Minority Participants?

Monday, March 11, 2013

Does Relationship/Marriage Education Work with Participants who have Low Incomes and/or with Minority Participants?

Note to usual readers of my blog. On 3-11-13, I posted an unusually long blog entry regarding an ongoing discussion among researchers and policy experts about the usefulness and impacts of relationship education services provided to couples who are economically disadvantaged or to couples of color. A colleague who is also a couple/marital researcher, Matthew Johnson, wrote a piece published last year (2012) in the American Psychologist wherein he suggested that the results of two large federal studies demonstrated that relationship education efforts were ineffective. He suggested that this may have been due, in part, to many of the couples in the studies having characteristics different from couples who have been studied more heavily in this field. Johnson made a reasonable call for more research to inform the field in working with couples who are disadvantaged. However, a number of researchers (including me) took issue with other suggestions and points made by Johnson. While we agreed with the wisdom in the call for more research, we took issue with aspects of Johnson's arguments. For example, we suggested that there was growing evidence that such relationship education interventions may be as--or even more--effective with the very couples Johnson suggested were not benefiting because of inadequate research.

The long post that I wrote on all of this is now included in a document that can be downloaded. The document includes the links to Johnson's original paper, the comment by a number of other researchers (including me) on his paper, and a reply by Johnson to our comment. The document also includes a link to a very helpful chapter on the subject by Alan Hawkins. My post on all of this is long and technical, and I have now moved it from the main stream of blog entries here to the document that you can download here.

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Why Sliding vs. Deciding?

Sliding vs. Deciding is a theme that comes out of my study of commitment and my work with my major colleague in this area, Galena Rhoades, and the work of other scholars on how couples go through important relationship transitions. I believe “sliding vs. deciding” captures something important about how romantic relationships develop. The core idea is that people often slide through important transitions in relationships rather than deciding what they are doing and what it means, especially regarding commitment. An important paper by Wendy Manning and Pamela Smock (2005) was influential in our thinking about how couples transitioned into living together. They conducted a qualitative study of cohabiting couples and found that over one half of couples who are living together didn’t talk about it or make any decision, but simply slid into doing so. Another paper having a large influence on this thinking was written by Jo Lindsey (2000). She found that the cohabiting couples she interviewed could not articulate how they came to be living together. In fact, as she puts it, it seemed like they had no agency in how it happened. Lindsay concluded that the fundamental characteristic of cohabitation was ambiguity, a theme we often discuss. Manning and Smock, Lindsay, and other researchers have noted that, for most couples, moving in together was nothing like a clear decision about what the couple was doing. Thus, it very often is not anything like a how people form a clear commitment. In one of our quantitative studies of cohabitation, we have found that most cohabiters report a process more like sliding into cohabitation than talking about it and making a decision about it.

We believe this sliding vs. deciding dynamic which is quite obvious in how couples come to live together is common in many important relationship transitions, including pregnancy, having children, work, as well as in how couples drift into regular patterns of who does what. In contrast to sliding, commitments that we are most likely to follow through on are based in decisions. In fact, commitment is making a choice to give up other choices. A commitment is a decision. Do we always need to be making a decision about things? I hope not. But when something important in life is at stake, I believe that deciding will trump sliding in how things turn out.

One of the most important implications of the concept of sliding vs. deciding is when this theme is married to our work and thought on the depths of ambiguity in relationship formation these days and our ideas about inertia. What people are often now seeing is that they are sliding through relationship transitions that cause them to increase constraints and lose options before (or without) noticing that they have just entered a more constrained pathway. As a result, we believe that many people are too often giving up options before they have made a choice. That is far from making a choice to give up other choices. That's losing options because one is not noticing an important, or even potentially high cost slide, is not what solid commitment formation is about.

Three theory papers written by me and Galena Rhoades are accessible above at the links: "Sliding vs. Deciding: Inertia and the Premarital Cohabitation Effect", "Commitment: Functions, Formation, and the Securing of Romantic Attachment," and the link labeled "SvD Transition and Risk Model."

Sliding vs Deciding: Scott Stanley's Blog

Monday, March 11, 2013

Does Relationship/Marriage Education Work with Participants who have Low Incomes and/or with Minority Participants?

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