Sliding vs Deciding: Scott Stanley's Blog: Small Correction & Clarification Related to Earlier Post RE Matthew Johnson's Paper

Saturday, March 23, 2013

Small Correction & Clarification Related to Earlier Post RE Matthew Johnson's Paper

For any of you following the rather detailed discussion about the impacts of relationship education services as tested in the large, federal studies here in the U.S., I just made the following correction to that long blog post on 3-11-2013.

The correction is this:

Correction/Clarification added 3-23-12: In looking deeper into the technical report for BSF at 36 months, Mathematica did test for moderation by African American identification in the overall BSF pooled sample at 36 months, as they did at 15 months. But they did not test for this moderation by site at 36 months. Matt Johnson had implied that this moderation became null at 36 months when it had been significant at 15 months. As applied to the full sample, Johnson is correct. As applied to the Oklahoma site, my assertion that this was not tested is correct (Rob Wood, personal communication, 7-25-2012). As has been clear here and elsewhere, I have focused on the Oklahoma site within the BSF study because of their much greater delivery of services to the intended participants compared to the other 7 sites. At 15 months, moderation by African American identification was tested and found to be very strong in the Oklahoma site, with African American couples benefitting the most. But on the question as to if this moderation maintained or not in the only site with evidence of an important lasting impact at 36 months (and if it holds or not for the family stability finding), we do not know the answer because, to the best of my knowledge, it has not yet been tested.

The entire post with links to all of the articles has been updated with the clarifying note above, and remains at this download link for readers here who are deeply interested in this subject. There are no other changes to the document.

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

Saturday, March 23, 2013

Small Correction & Clarification Related to Earlier Post RE Matthew Johnson's Paper

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