Contextual Influences on Relationships

Studying personal relationships requires that researchers focus attention on agency. Relationships do not just happen. They are built through people's actions or, more accurately, through their interactions over time. They are, in other words, active constructions consequent in part at least on the emergent thoughts, reflections, choices, and decisions people make across time about the involvement they want to have with others. Yet at the same time, relationships are not just about agency; they involve more than simply the individual choices and decisions that those involved make. Or to put this a little differently, the choices and decisions people appear freely to make about the content and patterning of their relationships are not as free as a focus on agency alone would suggest. Rather these choices and decisions are structured by aspects of their lives over which they have little if any direct control. This entry is concerned with exploring those factors external to personal relationships that nonetheless influence their content and form. After discussing why context is important in understanding personal relationships, the entry outlines [Page 324]different levels of context that impact relationships, briefly using the example of courtship to illustrate the arguments.

One element of how personal relationships are structured stems from what can be broadly termed psychological dispositions and dynamics—personality traits, attachment characteristics, and the like—which influence how individuals behave in their different relationships and in turn frame subsequent interactional responses within these relationships. But equally, the contexts in which different relationships are developed and sustained are also important in structuring these relationships. Even though at times they may be presented as entirely personal, in reality, personal relationships do not exist in a decontextu-alized void. Whether talking about relationships between lovers, friends, workmates, family, neighbors, spouses, or whatever, the way people “do” their relationships will be patterned by a wide range of factors external to the individuals and relationships in question. Such contextual influences are not determinate of relationships; there is always the interplay of agency and structure. Nonetheless, the contexts in which relationships are embedded provide the framework within which people actively construct their relationships.

The notion of context is inherently complex. Although the broad idea of context patterning personal relationships is largely uncontentious, it is far more difficult to be precise about the ways that different elements of context impact relational outcomes. The difficulty is that by its nature, context refers to a wide range of features external to relationships. It incorporates any and all aspects of the circumstances pertaining to a personal relationship and the individuals party to it that are not integral elements within that relationship. Potentially, context incorporates everything from the settings in which interactions occur to the sub-cultural mores of the participants to the sociohis-torical structures of the period. As a consequence, the boundaries of context, and the boundaries between different aspects of context, are inherently fuzzy. Specifying those features that should be included in analyzing why particular relationships are as they are is consequently somewhat arbitrary in that it depends in large measure on the focus the researcher chooses to take.

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