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

衡量人类身心健康的一个关键指标是关系的成功。有效的沟通已被证明是健康关系的一个关键决定因素，但这并不适用于不同的社会文化群体。研究人员承认存在一些重大挑战：抽样偏差;过度依赖在人口统计学同质样本中开发的标准化测量方法;以及在短暂的互动中研究夫妇的实验室设置的局限性，以及作为孤立的二人组。人类学家对不同文化和亚文化背景下的人际关系进行人种学调查，一再证明没有一种健康的方式来建立长期的伙伴关系，进一步表明，随着时间的推移，夫妻可能会更好地被理解为总是嵌入复杂和异质的社会，历史和经济过程并受到影响。人种学研究最近才开始调查这些条件和时刻到时刻的生物过程之间的联系，然而，虽然目前的工作表明，在孤立的相互作用中出现的生理模式的协同调节不一定可以推广到任何一个单一的关系或关系作为一个一般类别。因此，目前的研究部署了生物语言人类学的理论和工具，这是由PI及其同事以及亚拉巴马大学的研究生在试点和大规模研究中开发的，并将人类生物学与人类学中的人种学方法相结合，以调查文化，生物学，随着时间的推移，不同的夫妇之间的瞬间互动和经验共同出现。通过将多标量，纵向和基于社区的方法，研究结果将有助于对不同网站的日常关系意识形态的范围进行概括性的理解。这项研究将通过关注和识别个体内和夫妻内随时间变化的特定来源，进一步充实情感和生理协同调节和反调节的科学。这些发现无疑将影响未来的设计，大规模的生物语言学研究，显着扩大的有效性实验室研究的互动和生理之间的合作伙伴。作为一个职业项目，它还为来自代表性不足群体的研究生和本科生提供培训资金，培训他们掌握经验、科学数据收集和分析方法。研究产生的知识也将被纳入生物语言人类学的可共享教学法中;生物语言人类学方面正在进行的、全UA范围的每周协作研讨会;为普遍获得服务者和一般公众举办适龄教育讲习班，包括K-12教育计划，致力于帮助儿童了解当地社区的传播科学。在教师早期职业发展（CAREER）的支持下，研究人员将进行一个多阶段的纵向项目，调查美国和东亚100多名长期合作伙伴的健康关系的日常意识形态。抽样战略采用了几种常见的衡量标准，以确保可比性和普遍性。具体而言，参与者必须年龄在30至60岁之间，必须居住在中等至大型城市环境中，并且必须包括至少一名全职或兼职从事高压力领域公民参与的人员。该项目的第一阶段包括一个以社区为基础的参与性办法，其中包括匿名调查和与多达100名符合这些标准并目前处于长期伙伴关系的个人进行远程访谈。项目的这一部分评估参与者关于健康关系和沟通的想法，并旨在利用参与者的知识和经验，以确保项目的其余部分以利益攸关方的利益为基础。该项目的第二阶段还包括深入的生物人种学调查，研究伴侣之间的即时互动方式与时间匹配的生理唤醒之间的关系，这项为期一年的深入研究涉及多个地区的24对夫妇。这部分研究结合了人种学数据收集;自然发生的互动的视频记录;生理数据的收集;多次访谈;以及参与者驱动的移动的人种学。民族志，视频和生理数据将在一个集成的数字平台进行分析，以产生一个经验性的理解如何体现的经验和生理过程共同发生在多个时间尺度的交流遭遇。结合项目第一阶段收集的数据，它将进一步提供深入了解这种共同发生是如何通过参与者之间关于健康关系的共同和不同想法来调解的。研究结果不仅将丰富人类学、心理学和相关学科中现有的关于交流、情感和健康的研究，而且还将通过生物语言人类学的进一步发展，促进人类学理论和方法的转变，作为一种可用于研究多种现象的方法，研究人员试图研究文化、该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并被认为是值得通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估的支持。

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.