|
Article Excerpt
This study explored the underlying structure, stability, and predictive validity of college students 'scores on a measure of relationship maintenance self-efficacy beliefs. Three identified efficacy-related factors were found to be stable; related in expected directions with gender, commitment status, and adult attachment orientations; and uniquely predictive of subsequent relationship satisfaction.
**********
Although the capacity to form and maintain satisfying intimate relationships is considered one of the most important developmental tasks of early adulthood and a noteworthy predictor of positive mental health and adjustment (Collins, Cooper, Albino, & Allard, 2002), the progress of the research on the topic of healthy relationship maintenance has been slow (Perlman, 2001). Two previous studies (Canary & Stafford, 1992; Stafford & Canary, 1991) argued that effective relationship maintenance involves a wide array of specific behaviors such as engaging in shared activities, offering support and reassurance to one's partner, openly disclosing personal thoughts and feelings about the relationship, and cooperating with one's partner during disagreements. In another study, Lopez and Lent (1991) argued that Bandura's social-cognitive theory (SCT; Bandura, 1986), and particularly its key construct of self-efficacy beliefs (i.e., a person's perceived ability to engage in particular behaviors or to perform specific tasks), could be productively adapted to the study of close relationships as a means of advancing research on relationship maintenance. According to SCT, persons who view themselves as efficacious in executing particular behaviors will be more likely to approach, engage in, and persist in tasks that require these behaviors.
In extending SCT to the domain of relationship maintenance behaviors, Lopez and Lent (1991) drew on the literature available at the time regarding these competencies to develop and pilot a 25-item measure--the Relationship Self-Efficacy Scale (RSES)--using a sample of 61 college students who were involved in a romantic relationship. RSES items addressed perceived abilities to execute such relationship competencies as disclosing personal needs and hurts, providing comfort and care to one's partner, appropriately controlling feelings of anger and jealousy, and openly communicating with one's partner about relationship conflicts and expectations. Confidence ratings across items were summed to form a composite RSES score. Although RSES scores were highly reliable and significantly predicted participants' ratings of dyadic adjustment over a 3-month interval, sample size limitations in that preliminary scale validation precluded a careful examination of the measure's underlying factor structure or of its associations with gender or other relevant person and relationship variables.
Since the debut of the RSES, emergent theory and research findings have indicated that (a) relationship maintenance involves some additional complex skills that were not represented in the original RSES item pool and (b) the multiple competencies inherent in romantic relationship maintenance may be reducible to a more limited number of skill domains. For example, Harvey and Omarzu (1997) used the term minding to refer to a number of complex behavioral and appraisal skills that are essential to maintaining close and satisfying relationships over time. They argued that minding involves the execution of specific behaviors aimed at knowing the other; acceptance and respect for what is learned via the knowing process; and reciprocity in partners' thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. Minding behaviors thus appear to share a "preemptive" quality in that they are motivated by accurate anticipations of partner needs. More recently, Cassidy (2001) proposed the existence of four key abilities required for the achievement of intimacy in adult relationships: the ability to seek care, the ability to give care, the ability to feel comfortable with an autonomous self, and the ability to negotiate. Like Harvey and Omarzu, Cassidy's intimacy abilities encourage assessment of efficacy beliefs involving reciprocal and preemptive (i.e., negotiation) behaviors.
We reasoned that if theoretically distinct domains of relationship maintenance skills existed, then relationship self-efficacy beliefs may not represent a unidimensional construct and that more than one domain of these beliefs may exist. Therefore, a careful exploration of the underlying factor structure of relationship self-efficacy beliefs could advance research on relationship maintenance by promoting more domain-sensitive assessments of these beliefs. One impediment to this line of inquiry is the paucity of relationship-specific measures of self-efficacy beliefs. Most self-report measures of relationship competence typically assess such perceptions in global, generic ways or limit themselves to a single, broad domain of functioning such as problem solving (Fincham & Bradbury, 1987). Other measures, such as the Interpersonal Competence Questionnaire (Burhmester, Furman, Wittenberg, & Reis, 1988) or the Social Self-Efficacy Scale (Sherer et al., 1982), assess perceived abilities to establish peer relationships generally but do not assess self-efficacy beliefs within a specific intimate relationship. Although the RSES was designed as a relationship-specific measure of self-efficacy beliefs, a thorough exploration of its underlying factor structure has not yet been conducted.
Taken together, the findings and limitations of available research on relationship maintenance support an effort to clarify the underlying structure of relationship self-efficacy beliefs and to further explore their stability and their concurrent and predictive validity. Beyond potentially creating a more refined and domain-sensitive measure of these beliefs, such a refined measure might be especially useful in assisting college counselors in identifying particular domains of perceived relationship maintenance inefficacy that may be the most productive targets of therapeutic intervention.
THE PRESENT STUDY
To examine the factor structure of relationship self-efficacy beliefs, we first slightly augmented the initial pool of RSES items by including 10 new items addressing the more complex, reciprocal, and preemptive relationship maintenance behaviors described by Harvey and Omarzu (1997) and Cassidy (2001), for example, "Anticipate when your partner needs your support" and "Avoid criticizing your partner when he or she makes mistakes." We then administered the augmented RSES to a diverse sample of 608 undergraduates who were currently in an intimate relationship; participants also completed several other self-report measures for use in establishing the concurrent and predictive validity of RSES scores. To examine the test-retest stability of RSES scores, a subsample of 116 participants again completed the RSES 3 months later. Exploratory factor analyses (EFAs) and confirmatory factor analyses (CFAs) were used to clarify the underlying structure of retained RSES items prior to examining the concurrent and predictive validity of factor-derived RSES subscale scores.
We expected that (a) more than one factor should underlie the scores within our expanded pool of RSES items and (b) RSES scores would be at least moderately stable over time, positively related to relationship satisfaction, and higher among persons in committed versus noncommitted relationships. We also anticipated gender differences favoring women in RSES scores. Prior studies have shown that, compared with men, women on average are more skillful providers of emotional support (Goldsmith & Dun, 1997; Kunkel & Burleson, 1998) and that women are more likely to use relationship maintenance strategies such as self-disclosure, positivity, openness, assurances, and sharing tasks (Canary & Stafford, 1992; Dainton & Stafford, 1993; Murstein & Adler, 1995; Ragsdale, 1996; Stafford, Dainton, & Haas, 2000). Collectively, these findings suggest that women may generally hold stronger beliefs about their relationship maintenance skills. Only two studies were located that provided more direct support for this hypothesis. Clark (1993) found that, when faced with the task of comforting a partner, women "anticipated greater effectiveness prior to constructing their messages, rated their performances higher following message production, and attributed greater ability to themselves than to men" (p. 565). More recently, MacGeorge, Clark, and Gillihan (2002) found that, compared with men, women reported stronger self-efficacy beliefs in their capacities to provide emotional support to a distressed friend depicted in one of several hypothesized scenarios.
We also hypothesized that RSES scores should be related to a measure of adult attachment orientations and that, controlling for current levels of attachment insecurity, RSES scores should be uniquely predictive of subsequent relationship satisfaction. Adult attachment orientations refer to broad interpersonal dispositions toward experiencing either strong fears of rejection and abandonment (Attachment Anxiety) or strong aversion toward and discomfort with intimacy and closeness (Attachment Avoidance). Secure adult attachment is defined by low scores on both of these dispositions, whereas insecure attachment is characterized by high scores on one or both of these dispositions. Adult attachment orientations are considered relatively stable individual differences that, although related to the Big Five personality dimensions (Noftle & Shaver, 2006), have been shown to contribute uniquely to the quality of relationship outcomes even after scores on these more basic dimensions have been controlled. Adult attachment orientations were chosen for our scale validation purposes because in prior studies Attachment Anxiety and Avoidance scores have been significantly correlated in expected ways with specific relationship maintenance behaviors such as caregiving, support seeking, offering assurances (Collins & Feeney, 2000; B. C. Feeney & Collins, 2001, 2003; Kunce & Shaver, 1994; Simon & Baxter, 1993); empathy (Joireman, Needham, & Cummings, 2001); collaborative problem-solving attitudes (Corcoran & Mallinckrodt, 2000; Creasey & Hesson-McInnis, 2001; Lopez et al., 1997; Shi, 2003); self-disclosure (Bradford, Feeney, & Campbell, 2002; Mikulincer & Nachson, 1991); emotional self-awareness (Mallinckrodt & Wei, 2005); managing negative affects such as anger, jealousy, and other aversive feelings (J. A. Feeney, 1995, 1999; Mikulincer, 1998; Searle & Meara, 1999; Sharpsteen & Kirkpatrick, 1997); respect for partner (Frei & Shaver, 2002); as well as more global prosocial behaviors and dispositions associated with relationship satisfaction and stability (Anders & Tucker, 2000; Bippus & Rollin, 2003; DiTommaso, Brannen-McNulty, Ross, & Burgess, 2003; Fitzpatrick & Sollie, 1999; Jones & Cunningham, 1996; Mallinckrodt, 2000).
METHOD
Participants and Procedure
Six...
|
