Relationship science
Relationship science is an interdisciplinary field dedicated to the scientific study of interpersonal relationship processes. Due to its interdisciplinary nature, relationship science is made up of researchers of various professional backgrounds within psychology and outside of psychology, but most researchers who identify with the field are psychologists by training. Additionally, the field's emphasis has historically been close and intimate relationships, which includes predominantly dating and married couples, parent-child relationships, and friendships and social networks, but some also study less salient social relationships such as colleagues and acquaintances.
History
Early 20th century
Empirically studying interpersonal relationships and social connection traces back to the early 20th century when some of the earliest focuses were on family relationships from a sociological perspective—specifically, marriage and parenting. In 1938 the National Council on Family Relations was formed and, in 1939, what is now the Journal of Marriage and Family was established to publish peer-reviewed research with this emphasis. In the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, researchers such as John Bowlby, Harry Harlow, Robert Hinde, and Mary Ainsworth began pursuing the study of mother–infant attachment. In 1949, Reuben Hill developed the ABC-X model, which is a theoretical framework used to examine how families manage and adapt to crises given the resources they have. Then, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the purview of relationship research began to expand more, beyond the idea of just family research. In 1959, Stanley Schachter published the book The Psychology of Affiliation: Experimental Studies of the Sources of Gregariousness, where he discussed humans' general affiliative needs and how they are intensified by biological responses. That same year, Harold Kelley and John Thibaut published a book, The Social Psychology of Groups, that outlined interdependence theory—an interdisciplinary theory that would become an essential framework for understanding close relationships from a cost-benefit perspective in the years to come. However, this prior interest in relationships was infrequent, and it was not until the late 1960s and early 1970s that the study of relationships truly began to blossom and gain popularity, which was in large part due to the influence of Ellen Berscheid and Elaine Hatfield.1960s to 2000s
Roughly two decades after the aforementioned work of Hill and a decade after the works of Schachter, Kelley, and Thibaut, Ellen Berscheid and Elaine Hatfield began studying how two individuals become attracted to one another. Yet, their work went beyond just attraction and began to explore other domains such as the processes of choosing a romantic partner and falling in love, and the centrality of relationships in human health and well-being. However, being a female professor and researcher during the era was incredibly difficult, and was only made more difficult by the public reception to their phenomena of interest. In 1974, their work came under fire after the senator of Wisconsin at the time alleged their research was a waste of taxpayer dollars, in light of Berscheid receiving $84,000 from the National Science Foundation to study love. Despite this immense scrutiny, they nevertheless persisted in pioneering the nascent field of relationship science through the 1970s and into the 1980s through seminal developments such as the distinction between passionate and companionate love and a scale to measure the former. Meanwhile, researchers from across different disciplines had begun to dedicate themselves to the study of relationships.Along with the fast growing interest came high-impact works. Urie Bronfenbrenner's late 1970s and mid-1980s social–ecological model established key principles that researchers would eventually use ubiquitously to study the impact of socio-contextual factors on relationships. Graham Spanier published the Dyadic Adjustment Scale in JMF, which is currently the most widely cited scale of intimate relationship quality. John Bowlby's attachment theory, formalized in the late 1960s and early 1970s, laid the groundwork for the study of parent–child relationships and also helped shape the study of adult relationships in the field. Notably, in 1983, Harold Kelley, Ellen Berscheid, Andrew Christensen, Anne Peplau and their colleagues wrote the book Close Relationships, which provided a comprehensive overview of the field of relationship science in its early stages, and identified the typologies of relationships studied. Also in the 1980s and into the 1990s, Toni Antonucci began exploring friendships and social support among adults, while Arthur Aron was examining the role of relationships with romantic partners, siblings, friends, and parents in individual self-expansion. Additionally, Thomas Malloy and David Kenny developed the social relations model and Kenny later published his work on Models of Non-independence in Dyadic Research in 1996.
With a growing interest in marriage and family therapy in relationship science, in the late 1980s and 1990s, researchers such as Howard Markman, Frank Floyd, and Scott Stanley began developing romantic relationship interventions; specifically, in 1995, Floyd and colleagues published the program they developed, called Prevention Intervention and Relationship Enhancement. Interest in and development of relationship education programming increased in the 2000s due to state and federal Healthy Marriage Initiatives, which allocated grant funding to support programming that would impact disadvantaged communities.
Although there were many theoretical and empirical contributions of the 1970s and 80s, the professional evolution of relationship science was simultaneously taking place. The first international conference specifically dedicated to relationship processes took place in 1977 in Swansea, Wales, hosted by Mark Cook and Glen Wilson. In 1982, the first of the eventually bi-annual International Conference of Personal Relationships took place in Madison, Wisconsin, under the direction of Robin Gilmour and Steve Duck, with about 100 attendees. Two years later, in 1984, the International Society for the Study of Personal Relationships was borne out of the ICPR and the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, the first peer-reviewed journal unique to the field of relationship science, was established. Then in 1987, the Iowa Network of Personal Relationships was formed and Hal Kelley was elected president of ISSPR that same year. A few years later in 1991, Ellen Berscheid announced a merger of ISSPR and INPR, which ultimately fell through until the idea was reignited over a decade later. In 1994, the journal Personal Relationships was formally established by ISSPR and began publishing work in relationship science with Pat Noller as the editor; Anne Peplau became president of ISSPR. The changing of roles only persisted when Dan Perlman became president of ISSPR in 1996 and began discussing with the president of INPR how they might work to better integrate the efforts and goals of the two organizations; in 1998, Jeffry Simpson took over as editor of Personal Relationships.
The decades-long, interdisciplinary study of relationships culminated in Ellen Berscheid's 1999 article "The Greening of Relationship Science". Here, Berscheid took the opportunity to close out the 20th-century with an overview of the field's past, present, and future. She described the uniqueness and benefits of a well-integrated interdisciplinary field and the advancements that have cemented the field as an "essential science". However, she also discussed the shortcomings that were stifling the progress of the field, and provided specific advice for overcoming such limitations in the upcoming century. Some of this advice included leaving behind traditional analytic approaches that fail to consider non-independence of individuals in relationships, and prioritizing the implementation of existing methods that consider interdependent and dyadic data as well as "creatively constructing new ones". Additionally, she stressed the dire need of the field to inform public opinion and policy related specifically to intimate relationship stability —at the time, a hotly debated topic informed by partisan politics rather than empirical evidence, and for scientists to place greater emphasis on the environments in which relationships operate. Her article foreshadowed and influenced the evolution of the field in the 21st century, and its structure has since been adapted by other relationship researchers to reflect on how far the field has come and where it is going.
2000s
The year 2000 included new developments in the field such as Nancy Collins and Brooke Feeney's work on partner support-seeking and caregiving in romantic relationships from an attachment theory perspective, and Reis, Sheldon, Gable, and colleagues' article "Daily Well-being: The Role of Autonomy, Competence, & Relatedness". A couple of years later, Rena Repetti, Shelley Taylor, and Teresa Seaman published work that addressed some of Berscheid's 1999 article concerns as well as used health psychology perspectives to inform relationship science. They empirically demonstrated the negative effects of family home environments with significant conflict and aggression on the mental and physical health of individuals in both childhood and adulthood. Simultaneously, the early 21st century was a time for major changes in the professional development of the field. In 2004, after previously unsuccessful attempts, ISSPR and INPR merged to form the International Association for Relationship Research.In 2007, Harry Reis published "Steps Toward the Ripening of Relationship Science", an article inspired by Ellen Berscheid's 1999 article, that recapped and made suggestions for furthering the field. He discussed important works that could be used as framework for guiding the field, including Thomas Bradbury's 2002 article, "Research on Relationships as a Prelude to Action"—an article focussed on the mechanisms for improvement of relationship research including better integration of research findings, more ethnically and culturally diverse sampling, and interdisciplinary, problem-centered approaches to research. Reis argued the need for integrating and organizing theories, for paying more attention to non-romantic relationships in research and intervention development, and the use of his theory of perceived partner responsiveness to enable this progress. Fast-forwarding to 2012, relationship researchers again heeded Berscheid's advice of using relationships science to inform real-world issues. Eli Finkel, Paul Eastwick, Benjamin Karney, Harry Reis, and Susan Sprecher wrote an article discussing the impact of online dating on relationship formation and both its positive and negative implications for relationship outcomes compared to traditional offline dating. Additionally, in 2018, Emily Impett and Amy Muise published their follow-up to Berscheid's article, "The Sexing of Relationship Science: Impetus for the Special Issue on Sex and Relationships". Here, they called on the field to draw more attention to and place greater weight on the role of sexual satisfaction; they identified this area of research as nascent but fertile territory to explore sexuality in relationships and establish it as an integral part of relationship science.