A Novel, Network-Based Approach to Assessing Romantic-Relationship Quality

How should romantic relationship quality be approached psychometrically? This is a complicated theoretical and methodological challenge, which the authors start to address through three studies. In Study 1a, the authors identified 25 distinct romantic relationship categories among 754 items from 26 romantic relationship quality instruments, with a weak Jaccard index (0.38), indicating that the scales’ item content was very heterogeneous. Study 1b then demonstrated limited structure validity evidence in 43 scale development-validation articles of 23 of these 26 instruments. Finally, Study 2 surveyed 587 French-speaking participants in a romantic relationship on romantic relationship quality. Applying a network-based model, four dimensions were identified, with three items being central to relationship quality. The inferences were mostly limited to French-speaking, monogamous, heterosexual women. To resolve challenges detected in the literature, the authors recommend a multi-country qualitative approach, more diverse sampling, better definitions of romantic relationship quality, and a dynamical systems approach to measuring romantic relationship quality. We provide a manual for the new scale on our OSF page: https://osf.io/qj69p.