CAREER: A Longitudinal Study of Communication and Biology in Committed Relationships

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A critical measure of human physical and psychological health is relationship success. Effective communication has been shown to be a critical determinant of healthy relationships, but that does not translate uniformly across different sociocultural groups. Researchers acknowledge a number of significant challenges: sampling bias; an overreliance on the use of standardized measures developed among demographically homogenous samples; and the limitations of laboratory settings where couples are studied in brief interactions, and as isolated dyads. Anthropologists conducting ethnographic investigations of human relationships across diverse cultural and sub-cultural settings have repeatedly demonstrated that there is no single healthy way to engage in long-term partnerships, further showing that couples might better be understood as always embedded in and affected by complex and heterogeneous social, historical, and economic processes over time. Ethnographic research has only recently begun to investigate the linkage between such conditions and moment-to-moment biological processes, however, though current work suggests that physiological patterns of coregulation emerging in isolated interactions cannot necessarily be generalized to either a single relationship or to relationships as a general category. The current research thus deploys the theories and tools of biolinguistic anthropology, which has been developed in both pilot and large-scale studies by the PI and colleagues as well as graduate students at the University of Alabama and integrates human biology with ethnographic approaches in anthropology, in order to investigate the ways in which culture, biology, and experience co-emerge in moment-to-moment interaction among diverse couples over time. By incorporating a multi-scalar, longitudinal, and community-based approach, findings will contribute to a generalizable understanding of the range of everyday relationship ideologies across different sites. The research will further flesh out the science of emotional and physiological co- and counter-regulation by attending to and identifying specific sources of intra-individual and intra-couple variability over time. These findings will undoubtedly impact the future design of large-scale biolinguistic studies that significantly expand on the validity of laboratory studies of interaction and physiology among partners. As a CAREER project, it further provides funding for the training of both graduate and undergraduate students from underrepresented groups in methods of empirical, scientific data collection and analysis. Knowledge generated by the research will also be integrated into shareable pedagogy in biolinguistic anthropology; an ongoing, collaborative UA-wide weekly seminar in biolinguistic anthropology; and age-appropriate educational workshops for both UA and the general public, including K-12 educational programs dedicated to helping children learn about the science of communication in local communities.With the support of a Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award, the researcher will conduct a multi-phase, longitudinal project investigating everyday ideologies of healthy relationships of more than 100 individuals in long-term partnerships in both the U.S. and East Asia. The sampling strategy incorporates several common denominators in order to ensure comparability and generalizability. Specifically, participants must be between the ages of 30 and 60, must live in medium to large urban environments, and must include at least one person works full- or part-time in the high-stress field of civic engagement. The first phase of the project consists of a community-based participatory approach that includes both anonymous surveys and remote interviews with up to 100 individuals who meet these criteria and are currently in a long-term partnership. This portion of the project assesses participants’ ideas about healthy relationships and communication as well as it aims to build upon the knowledge and experience of participants in order to ensure that the remainder of the project is based in stakeholder interests. The second phase of the project further includes an in-depth bio-ethnographic investigation of the ways in moment-to-moment interaction between partners is associated with time-matched physiological arousal in a year-long intensive study of 24 couples across multiple locales. This portion of the research combines ethnographic data collection; video-recording of naturally occurring interaction; collection of physiological data; multiple interviews; and participant-driven mobile ethnography over the course of a year. Ethnographic, video, and physiological data will be analyzed in an integrated digital platform to yield an empirical understanding of how embodied experience and physiological processes co-occur with communicative encounters at multiple timescales. In combination with data collected in the first phase of the project, it will further provide insight into how this co-occurrence is mediated by both shared and divergent ideas about healthy relationships among participants. Findings will not only enrich existing studies on communication, emotion, and health in anthropology, psychology, and related disciplines, but will also contribute to the transformation of theory and method in anthropology through the further development of biolinguistic anthropology as an approach that can be applied to study multiple phenomenon in which researchers seek to investigate the multi-directional, diverse, and varying processes through which culture, communication, and physiological regulation co-emerge in interaction over time.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.