Amie M. Gordon | Leveraging Modern Technology to Better Understand Relationships from Beginning to End

Institute of Personality and Social Research Colloquium

Despite decades of research, relationship scientists have yet to fully unpack the mysteries of dating and compatibility. We still cannot robustly predict the formation and dissolution of any given romantic relationship. Furthermore, the researchers who study attraction and initial dating tend to have little overlap with those who study the maintenance of established relationships, leaving many unanswered questions about trajectories of relationships over time. In this talk, I will discuss two ongoing projects that attempt to fill some of the gaps in this literature by leveraging modern technology to gather large-scale data on the formation and dissolution of romantic relationships. One project leverages dating apps—the most common way for couples to meet today—to gain new insights into relationship formation. In collaboration with Elizabeth Bruch, a U-M sociologist, my lab has spent the past two years developing Revel, a dating app designed for science, not profit. A second project uses intensive longitudinal methods to track moment-to-moment relationship experiences with the goal of better understanding the dynamic patterns of change in relationship quality and stability over time. This talk showcases how these projects might enable us to track the full lifecycle of relationships at an unprecedented scale and shed new light on the dynamics of relationships from beginning to end.