Sliding vs Deciding: Scott Stanley's Blog: Who Benefits from Relationship Education? Notes from my Plenary Address at NARME

Monday, August 13, 2012

Who Benefits from Relationship Education? Notes from my Plenary Address at NARME

This is one of those entries that will be of more interest to a specific subgroup of those who follow this blog. It’s about findings and some controversies in the field of couple relationship education (CRE; also often called marriage and relationship education). For the rest of you, I promise something fun later next week.

In July, I gave a plenary address at the National Association of Relationship and Marriage Education annual conference in Baltimore. I had two goals in this talk.

Goal #1: My first goal was to present an update of findings from our study of CRE delivered to US Army couples by chaplains. Some of those findings have already been published but I also presented the findings from the most recent analyses that will go into journal reports we are writing at this time. My co-investigators in this work are Elizabeth Allen, Howard Markman, & Galena Rhoades, and the study is funded by The Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD).

Goal #2: My second goal was to address some issues raised in recent discussions about the impact of CRE. I do this by covering some specific findings from three large samples (including the Army study) as well as meta-analyses of an array of studies. If you are interested in the debates about the government efforts in the past decade that funded some community efforts that used CRE, I cover some of the important issues in my talk.

You can download a pdf of the slides from my talk at NARME,here.

You can review my post from last year, summarizing general evidence related to CRE, here.

I’ll try for something edgy on dating and mating in a week and a half or so!

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, August 13, 2012

Who Benefits from Relationship Education? Notes from my Plenary Address at NARME

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