Enduring Love? Understanding long-term adult couple relationships in contemporary Britain

Gabb, Jacqui (2017). Enduring Love? Understanding long-term adult couple relationships in contemporary Britain. [Data Collection]. Colchester, Essex: Economic and Social Research Council. 10.5255/UKDA-SN-851244

Data description (abstract)

Enduring Love? is a psycho-social qualitative investigation into long-term adult couple relationships in contemporary Britain. The project will examine the ways in which gender, generation and parenthood get inscribed in meanings and practices around the idea of 'the couple'. The study will explore the gendered 'relationship work' that women and men do to stay together in the socio-cultural context of shifting discourses on love, 'marriage', partnership, intimacy and commitment.The study will comprise 50 couples (aged 18-65), including couples with and without children. It will use an innovative qualitative mixed methods approach, involving participants in diary writing, designing emotion maps, photo-elicitation and semi-structured interviews. These different methods aim to draw upon a broad spectrum of research senses, to access rich accounts of couples' emotional lives and everyday relationship practices.Enduring Love? is based in the Research Centre for Citizenship, Identities and Governance (CCIG), where it is connected to the Families and Relationships Programme and the Psychosocial Studies Programme. It was developed through start-up funding provided by the OU in support of the Intimate Futures and Relational Lives Research Group.

Data creators:

Creator Name	Affiliation	ORCID (as URL)
Gabb Jacqui	Open University

Contributors:

Name	Affiliation	ORCID (as URL)
McCarthy Jane
Fink Janet

Sponsors:

ESRC

Grant reference:

RES-062-23-3056

Topic classification:

Society and culture
Psychology

Keywords:

love, gender, couples

Project title:

Enduring Love? Understanding long-term adult couple relationships in contemporary Britain

Grant holders:

Jacqui Gabb, Janet Fink, Jane Mccarthy

Project dates:

From	To
12 September 2011	11 November 2013

Date published:

10 Feb 2014 13:06

Last modified:

13 Jul 2017 13:54

Coverage and Methodology

Access and Administration

Data sourcing, processing and preparation:

• ‘Researchers using the data set should not seek to reconcile cases as this may compromise confidentiality agreements with the participants’. • ‘Emotion maps have been made accessible to researchers but they cannot be downloaded for use in publications. This is to ensure that no details about participants’ homes are revealed, thereby avoiding the disclosure of potential identifying information’. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ The process of researching couples has the potential to impact on participants' relationship with one another in unexpected ways. Interviewing couples together and apart opens up the couple dynamic to close scrutiny, as partners often craft different accounts of coupledom and 'relationship stories' from one another. As such, individuals are not only revealing aspects of their 'private lives' to the outside world, they may be sometimes voicing emotions and opinions about their partners that could have long-lasting consequences for the couple relationship. The richness of material generated through a qualitative mixed methods approach also produces particularly revealing insights into the dynamics of personal relationships. This project, therefore, raises important questions of confidentiality and challenges for anonymising material for publication. To address these issues, the research team was rigorous in ensuring that data collected from an individual was not shared with their partner. Published material will always be anonymised in such a way that it does not reveal confidential details of an individual's account to their partner. Participants were made aware of the scope of confidentiality agreements and offered the opportunity to read transcripts of their data and elaborate on or delete comments. In preparing data for archiving, transcripts of diaries, individual interviews and couple collage interviews have been systematically anonymized. This means that: • transcripts of individual interviews and diaries do not include the pseudonyms of partners to avoid one partner identifying what has been said about her/him by the other • transcripts of couple collage interviews use different pseudonyms from those in individual interviews. This is to maintain the confidentiality of what was said by each participant in the two interviews. • individual and couple cases have been differently numbered. Researchers using the data set should not seek to reconcile cases as this may compromise confidentiality agreements with the participants. • spatial references have been replaced by larger, non-disclosing geographical areas • specific information about workplace and/or occupation has been replaced by more generic employment names and/or professional terms Emotion maps have been made accessible to researchers but they cannot be downloaded for use in publications. This is to ensure that no details about participants’ homes are revealed, thereby avoiding the disclosure of potential identifying information.

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