Relationship Science, Disciplines Contributing to

The Study of Relationships: Disciplinary, Multidisciplinary, or Interdisciplinary Endeavor?

In the late 1970s and the early 1980s, eminent relationship scholars including Robert Hinde, Ellen Berscheid, and L. Anne Peplau called for a science of relationships. They envisioned a science of relationships that would be descriptive in the sense of identifying the various forms that relationships can take and predictive in the sense of identifying the factors that shape and are shaped by personal relationships. Although there had been work on relationships in several fields, their calls were aspirational, implying that they wanted a relationship science that was something more than what Philip Blumstein depicted as “the neglected stepchild of the social sciences.” Almost 30 years later, is there now a separate discipline uniquely and cohesively devoted to the study of relationships?

To determine whether a discipline exists, one can look for institutional markers and the communal aspects of scientific endeavors. The institutional markers include such things as professional societies, journals, university departments, students obtaining their degrees in the field, being labeled as a discipline, and the like. The study of relationships has some of these [Page 1349]markers, including a professional association, the International Association for Relationship Research, and journals (e.g., Personal Relationships and the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships). Some individuals call themselves relationship scholars, but relationship science is not a commonly used department name in universities. There are degrees from family studies departments, the University of Minnesota has a doctoral minor in Interpersonal Relationships Research, UCLA has an Interdisciplinary Relationship Science Program, and students in some more traditional social science departments can concentrate within their discipline on the study of relationships. Relationship science doctoral degrees per se, however, are rare, if they exist at all. Thus, the study of relationships lacks some of the organizational properties of more senior, larger academic disciplines. Equally important, relationship researchers lack the communal component that classically marks a discipline: They do not all share the same intellectual heritage and tradition.

At present, scholars from several disciplines—sometimes each largely in their own solos, sometimes together—engage in the study of personal relationships. Some (e.g., Harry Reis, the coeditor of this encyclopedia) have labeled the field multidisci-plinary, whereas others (e.g., textbook author Dale Wright) have treated it as interdisciplinary. At issue here is the degree of integration. Multidisciplinary research is additive and complementary, but less integrative. The multidisciplinary type of science exists if scholars in different disciplines are each working on relationship issues from their own perspectives, but have some awareness of one another, perhaps making some comparisons between approaches. Interdisciplinary research requires more integration: It is characterized by such attributes as significant citation of work from other fields, coinvestigators from different disciplines formulating problems and working together, having variables associated with different disciplines together in the same study, blending conceptual frameworks from different disciplines in the interpretative framework for discussing the results, and the like. Much of the work published in personal relationship journals at this time qualifies as multidisciplinary; a smaller—but hopefully growing—proportion of it is interdisciplinary.

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