Appendix 1: Researching Couples' Long-Term Relationships
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Appendix 1: Researching Couples’ Long-Term Relationships Researching couples’ long-term relationships This book is based on findings from our studyEnduring Love? Couple Relationships in the 21st Century, which explored how couples experience, understand and sustain their long-term relationships. It was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC RES-062-23-3056) and carried out between 2011 and 2013. At the core of the study’s development was a commitment to ensur- ing not only its intellectual rigour but also its policy and practice relevance. We established, therefore, an advisory framework for the study which brought together leading academics and independent researchers in the field as well as policymakers and representatives from third sector organisations with key roles in providing relationship support and education. Their interest, contributions and interventions have been invaluable and illustrate how our dialogic approach was central to the success of the study’s impact and public engagement. In designing and implementing the study, we sought to situate emotions at the conceptual, methodological and analytical heart of our research inquiry as relationships are comprised of a whole spectrum of feelings and experi- ences. Our aim in this was to access the ways that everyday experience and emotions interact but also to ensure that we DOI: 10.1057/9781137434432.0011 Appendix 1: Researching Couples’ Long-Term Relationships were able to portray vibrant and visceral accounts of long-term relation- ships. We thus sought to resist the deployment of relationship typologies that feature in some academic studies and relationship support services, focusing instead on research practices that would facilitate exploration of how sets of contexts, predispositions and lifestyles might combine in myriad ways to form and reform couple relationships. We also left open the definition of what might constitute a long-term relationship in order to better understand how couples themselves experienced and imagined their relationship as an enduring one. To these ends, we deployed a mixed methods research design with qualitative methods being used to drill down into the embodied, lived experience of couples and a survey to generate a large-scale quantitative and qualitative dataset on couples’ everyday relationship practices. Participants who took part in the qualitative dimension of the study are identified by two pseudonyms: the first accompanies their individual data, the second their couple interview data. This is to ensure that assur- ances of confidentiality are honoured, with individual accounts being kept separate from those of the couple. Such assurances also mean that no biographical details about our participants can be provided in this outline of the Enduring Love? study. In some instances, however, couples spoke about sharing their data. In these circumstances we sometimes draw on ‘couple data’ from both partners to advance a particular analyti- cal point. In the absence of dialogue and/or personal contact, quotations from survey participants remain anonymous. Online survey Our online survey was located on the study’s website www.enduringlove. co.uk and implemented using the free online survey and questionnaire software SurveyMonkey. It was implemented over a 12-month period. Participants were recruited through features and news coverage of the research study posted on various online forums, newsletters and commu- nity group noticeboards, especially those clustered around parenting, relationship support and the student population of the institutional host (The Open University). As a recruitment strategy for the qualitative dimension of the study and to boost under-represented groups in the survey cohort, the survey questionnaire was also implemented in hard copy format among ‘hard to reach’ community groups and networks. The DOI: 10.1057/9781137434432.0011 Appendix 1: Researching Couples’ Long-Term Relationships survey generated 5445 responses worldwide. However, since our analysis in this book is concerned with the particular personal, socio-economic and political contexts of couple relationships in mainland Britain, our focus is on data from the survey’s UK cohort only. This comprised a convenience sample of 4494 respondents. In order to access the survey online, participants were required to go to the study’s website where detailed information on the scope and methodology of the research was provided, alongside frequently asked questions (FAQs) which were attentive to issues related to research ethics. The survey was designed so that only those participants who stated they were in a long-term couple relationship could go on to complete it. Details of the survey sample’s composition can be found in Appendix 2, Table A2.9. Like other large-scale studies on relationship support, our participation rates included a gendered skew, higher than average educational qualifications and a predominantly white cohort (Walker et al., 2010). The survey included three sets of multiple-choice statements, using Likert scale responses ranging from 1 to 5. These spoke to the structuring interests of the Enduring Love? study overall and enabled us to identify patterns in behaviour and the factors which appeared to signal relation- ship satisfaction. In analysing these data we devised scales of Relationship quality Relationship with partner Relationship maintenance Happiness with relationship/partner Happiness with life Principal Component Analysis with Varimax Rotation was used to produce these five relationship measures. We computed basic descrip- tive statistics for demographic information. Multivariate Analyses of Variance (MANOVA) and correlation analyses were used to address more complex research questions, facilitating examination of relation- ship satisfaction and the patterning of relationship experience (for full details of survey design and analytical strategy, see Gabb et al., 2013). Examination of these relationship measures, however, falls outside the remit of this book and its concern with relationship practices. Instead, our analysis is focused on survey answers to multiple-choice questions and open, free-text questions, in which participants were asked to say what they liked and disliked about their relationship, and what their DOI: 10.1057/9781137434432.0011 Appendix 1: Researching Couples’ Long-Term Relationships partner did that made them feel appreciated. These questions generated over 10,000 responses in total, all of which were systematically coded using a grounded theory approach. To facilitate mixed methods analysis, across the dataset, our quantitative and qualitative coding frames were consistent. Qualitative design and methods The Enduring Love? study also had a major qualitative dimension. Our qualitative research sample consisted of 50 couples: women (n = 54), men (n = 43) and other/queer (n = 3). It included couples across three age cohorts: 18–34, 35–54 and 55–65+, with equal numbers of couples with and without children. Purposive sampling was used to recruit these three primary groups, enabling us to interrogate the study’s key analyti- cal foci: gender, generation and parenthood. Our aim was not, however, to map relationship practices and gendered roles onto men and women but rather to examine the impact of socio-cultural norms, personal biographies and social differences on how women and men behave in relationships and how they perceive emotional ties. Similarly, the age cohorts were not included as a means to impose determining criteria about the meanings of relationships for older or younger couples. They were used to facilitate an analysis attentive to the significance of ‘genera- tion’ for understanding how being situated in a particular historical period might shape couple relationships and experience of life course transitions (Fink & Gabb, 2014; Nilsen & Brannen, 2014). Other areas of social diversity included education/socio-economic status, sexual orientation, race/ethnicity and religious belief. The final composition of the qualitative sample therefore comprised 30 per cent ‘working class’ (classified through education, employment and self- identification); 58 per cent either married or in a civil partnership; and 50 per cent with a religious belief, including several couples where faith was identified as a defining feature in their lives. Four couples described their relationships as non-monogamous or open. Two of the couples lived apart. While the sample was predominantly white/British (76 per cent), we employed targeted strategies to recruit Asian participants (n = 14) so that we could complete meaningful analysis of racial and cultural differences among a clearly identified sample subset (Gabb & Singh, 2014). Similar strategies were deployed around sexual diversity, with the DOI: 10.1057/9781137434432.0011 Appendix 1: Researching Couples’ Long-Term Relationships sample comprising 30 per cent lesbian, gay, bisexual and queer partici- pants. Queer is used here as a category of self-identity. We also recruited among the ‘trans’ population and the sample includes four participants from this group. Recruitment among local community, parenting and family support groups as well as faith communities gave us access to ‘hard to reach’ groups such as socially disadvantaged and minority ethnic couples. Lesbian and gay couples were recruited through targeted online forums, local community groups and through snowballing techniques among personal networks. The research team comprised many