Intimate Relationship Dynamics and Social Health from Early to Established Adulthood

Social health—the quantity and quantity of social ties—is a strong predictor of overall well-being, including
both physical and mental health [80,81]. Our goal is to understand how established adulthood (early 30s)
social health corresponds to patterns of adverse young adulthood (ages 18-23) intimate relationship
experiences (AYREs)—conflict and violent victimization, partner dominance, churning, and partner cheating.
We will use three data sources: (1) The NICHD-funded Relationship Dynamics and Social Life (RDSL)
project’s existing 2.5 years of weekly longitudinal survey data on a random sample of 992 18- and 19-year-old
women living in a county in Michigan, (2) Existing in-depth interviews with a disadvantaged sub-sample of 75
RDSL respondents who experienced a pregnancy or had high model-based propensity for pregnancy. And (3)
New in-depth re-interviews of the disadvantaged subsample. The subsample is especially important because
their children (n=66 total children by the end of RDSL) will experience their mothers’ AYREs as adverse
childhood experiences (ACEs), which are strongly linked to long-term impaired mental and physical health.
For our first aim, we will first use sequence analysis methods and the existing survey data (n=942 ever-
partnered respondents) to identify and describe theoretically meaningful, and empirically representative
patterns of AYREs. Next, we will use the existing RDSL in-depth interview data (n=75) to describe the
respondents and their AYREs within each pattern observed in the disadvantaged subsample, in detail. And we
will compare the patterns present in the subsample against all of the patterns present in the main sample to
assess selectivity in AYREs for respondents with disadvantaged family background, young pregnancy, and
associated adolescent experiences with penile-vaginal sex and pregnancy.
For our second aim, we will collect and analyze new in-depth re-interviews with the high-risk subsample
(n=75), focused on social health. We will compare social health across the AYRE patterns from Aim 1 that are
present in the high-risk subsample, to test our overarching hypothesis that AYREs correspond to poorer
established adulthood social health, net of disadvantage. We will identify respondents whose experiences do
not match our hypotheses—“surprising” results—using an abductive approach to generate new ideas and
explain/interpret the context and meaning of the in-depth interview data.
Our proposed project is innovative in its: (1) focus on life course changes in a broad range of intimate
relationships, including non-marital and non-coresidential relationships; (2) expansion of the ACE framework
to incorporate AYREs; (3) an innovative data reduction technique (sequence analysis) to summarize up to 130
weeks of data on eight weekly varying measures of AYREs for 942 respondents, (4) focus on a disadvantaged
and important subpopulation to “control for” disadvantage, an important potential confounder of a link
between AYREs and social health, and (5) an innovative approach to theory generation (abductive analysis).

Grant Number: 5R21HD111820-02
NIH Institute/Center: NIH
Principal Investigator: JENNIFER BARBER