On Thursday, May 11, 2022, Migs Silan is giving a talk for the EASP-IARR joint symposium on What’s Love Got To Do With It: Diversity in Close/Romantic Relationships. His presentation is available on the dedicated section of the symposium’s site (together with all the other wonderful presentations, which you should definitely check out), but you can also see it below, together with the abstract of the paper that the main author, Blandine Ribotta, recently submitted (note that as it received a sizable R+R, it will be heavily revised!).
Manuscript Abstract
Central to interventions to improve the quality of romantic relationships is its measurement. Yet, to what degree is the concept of relationship quality well-defined, and, importantly, well-measured? In the present article, the authors conducted a comprehensive search of instruments measuring relationship quality in ProQuest, Web of Science, and Scopus finding a total of 599 scales, with 26 meeting our definition of romantic relationship quality. When the authors investigated the 26 scales’ overlap of item-content, they identified 25 distinct categories among 754 items (with our database of items on the OSF: https://osf.io/v964p/). The mean overlap between scales was weak (Jaccard Index correlation coefficient = 0.39), indicating that these scales were very heterogeneous. The authors then assessed to what extent researchers reported internal validity in 43 scale development-validation articles. They found that Cronbach’s Alpha was most often reported (in 91% of the articles). Other aspects were reported far less often, with 55% reporting exploratory factor analyses, 26% reporting confirmatory factor analyses, 23% reporting test-retest reliability, 7% reporting measurement invariance. The heterogeneity of measures and lack of reported general validity of romantic relationship quality points to the need for concept-driven work on the assessment of romantic relationship quality.