This application seeks 5 years of support to investigate continuity and change in the development of romantic relationships and marriage in young adults, and to link relationship development to changes in physical and emotional health. The proposed project will address this goal by returning to an existing cohort of over 500 men and women who were adolescents when the study began in1989. Nearly all participants (""""""""targets"""""""") graduated from high school in 1994 and are now in their late 20s. Most are now married and many have children. In 2004, NICHD provided funding to continue research on the romantic relationships and parent-child relationships of targets who were parents. The present application proposes to collect 2 new waves of data in academic years (2005 - 06) and (2007 - 08) from targets who are not parents. The new data from the two projects will be merged and combined with earlier data collected from in-home interviews conducted every two years since 1989, with telephone follow-ups during the off-years. The in-home interviews include videotapes of interactions between targets and their parents while they were adolescents (1989 - 1994) and with their romantic partners (if they had one) in the years since graduating from high school (1995 - 2003). This rich archive of data contains multi-informant reports on targets'personality, romantic relationships, physical health, psychological problems and psychological distress, as well as the socioeconomic status and experiences while they were adolescents in their family of origin and since leaving their homes to start careers and families of their own. The specific objectives are to (1) examine the effects of characteristics in the family of origin, personal attributes, and other life experiences on the timing of relationship initiation and the transition to marriage and cohabitation;(2) prospectively examine intergenerational pathways, such as personal attributes and diverse life experiences, that are expected to link characteristics of the family of origin to the quality and stability of adult romantic relationships;and (3) examine mutual influences between trajectories of relationship characteristics (e.g., patterns of interaction, relationship quality and stability) and trajectories of physical and emotional health of romantic partners. The research will use survival models to examine how characteristics of targets and their families of origin affect the timing of marriages. Among those targets who have established romantic relationships, researchers will use growth curves to describe trajectories of relationship characteristics (e.g., relationship quality, marital stability, patterns of interaction) and link the trajectories back to characteristics of families of origin. Autoregressive models will be used to examine the mutual effects of changes in relationships on trajectories of physical and psychological health. Overall, the prospective multi-wave, multi-informant data uniquely positions us to evaluate competing hypotheses about the effects of family of origin on romantic relationships and to model the dynamic relationship between relationship quality and physical and psychological health.
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