Results of Completed Projects

Relationships at a Distance Study

Being in a romantic relationship when you and your partner don’t live in the same city is challenging! Despite the challenges, long-distance relationships aren’t that much different from geographically close relationships in many important ways.

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Body Image and Relationship Study

There is a high level of consensus among gender and relationship researchers that women in heterosexual partnerships, despite being more educated and more involved in the workforce than ever before, are still completing the vast majority of work within the home.

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Couples Communication Study

Our goal was to understand how romantic partners and relationships change over time and the factors and processes related to success or failure.  We focused on a set of relationship processes that are critically important to relationship and sexual functioning such as empathy, forgiveness, and conflict, and how personal characteristics (e.g., self-image) are related to these processes.

Infograph: The Couples Communication Study Infograph

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Perceptions in Close Relationships Study

There is a growing body of literature that explores the process of forgiving others (e.g., Fincham,2000; Maio et al., 2008), but less is known about the process of self-forgiveness in relationships.

Download PDF: Perceptions in Close Relationships Study

Longitudinal Marriage Study

The goal of this project is similar to that of the Transition to Marriage Study: How does the nature and quality of positive behaviours and experiences shape the developmental course of marriage?

Download PDF: Longitudual Marriage Study

Transition to Marriage Study

Approximately 149,000 couples will marry and 70,000 couples will divorce in a given year in Canada (Statistics Canada, 2001). Of the couples who marry today in Canada, approximately 40% will divorce at some point. How do couples go from being so happy that they pledge tospend the rest of their lives together, to deciding that they can no longer remain married?

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Daily Experiences in Romantic Relationships Study

We are interested in how people in romantic relationships talk with their partner about every day things. Whether their daily experiences are positive or negative, we would like to know more about how much people talk about these events, their perceptions of these conversations, and how they feel about the relationship and their partner.

Download PDF: Daily Experiences in Romantic Relationships