Parental-Partner Similarity, Parental Attachment, and Relationship Satisfaction
What is the association between how similar your parent and partner are and the relationship to your partner? Does your attachment to your parent play a role in that?
This is my thesis project quantitatively exploring the associations between these three variables in emerging adults in India. An academic paper is now under review for publication.
Who did I cover and where?
263
participants we've sampled
3
variables we've explored
2
key findings
This was my Master's thesis project. I had an overarching question in my mind based on my interest in research the experiences and dynamics of relationships and partner preferences; "Are people more attracted to those who are similar to their parents? What makes this more or less likely? Does it depend on the exisiting closeness with their parents?" This question was further refined in my subsequent secondary literature reviews; it was a popular question with no definitive answers and controversial discussions. While I would've loved to explore this experimentally, due to the pandemic and budget constraints, I settled for a correlational investigation. Besides, the Indian population had not been investigated in past studies on the same, and I thought it would be a good start! Especially, given this context: Indian traditional cultural norms + physical proximity of young adults to their parents + Western cultural influences on dating lifestyles on urban Indians.
I collected data in the form of psychometric online surveys from young adults in urban India. These surveys were to tap into: a) the participants' level of attachment to their opposite-sex parents and b) the level satisfaction with their most significant partner. They were also administered brief personality measures on how participants perceived the personalities of their opposite-sex parents and partners.
I then cleaned this data, ran various data checks, and analyzed it using moderation analysis. I was looking to see if an interaction between the perceived personality similarity between your opposite-sex parent and partner would impact how strongly or weakly your attachment to your parent would predict how happy you are with your partner.
For example: Suppose you are a heterosexual woman, and you are reasonably satisfied in your relationship with your boyfriend. You are also close to your father. If you perceived your boyfriend to be extroverted, and you also perceived your father to be a similar level of extroverted, would that mean that how close you are to your father more strongly predicts how happy you will be with your partner?
What did I do?
What did I find?
I found several interesting nuggets of information!
There are different areas of personality I was looking at for perceived similarity between one's parents & partners. All of them had different results in how they improve the strength of the association between one's attachment to an opposite-sex parent and one's relationship satisfaction with an opposite-sex partner. Some notable findings were:
Neuroticism had the biggest role to play in this! This area refers to being anxiety-prone or worried. Overall, for all people when considering them as one big group of young adults, perceiving the parent-partner to be similar on neuroticism was the biggest moderator for how strongly being close to their parent was associated with being happy in their relationship with a partner.
When separated by gender, this played a role mostly for men! Men who are closer to their mothers, seem to be more satisfied with the relationship with their partner if partners were similar in anxiousness to their mothers. This was not seen for women. If women were not close with their father, perceiving the father and partner to be similar in neuroticism made them less satisfied in their relationship with their partners.
For more information, you can view my research paper here!