There is a dearth of Australian literature regarding relationship quality and maintenance. Understanding both of these, and the factors likely to influence them, is important for practitioners seeking to best meet the needs of Australian couples. This paper reports a cross-sectional study examining relationship quality and maintenance. Analyzing survey data on long-term Australian couple relationships (n = 412), we found that relationship quality was strongly associated with the duration of the relationship and whether children lived in the home. Relationship maintenance, consisting of practices conducive to relationship happiness, was associated more strongly with those in relationships of 1-5 years than with longer-term dyads. The findings provide insights into practices that are connected to relationship satisfaction and well-being.

This study presents the initial validation of the Multidimensional Quality of Relationship Scale (M-QoRS), which was designed to capture the dynamic nature of both unidimensional and multidimensional intimate relationship quality. Confirmatory Factor Analyses of online survey data from 745 people tested a series of models, ultimately revealing a bi-factor solution as the best fitting structure. This final model includes a Relationship quality general factor and four domain-specific latent variables, namely Quality of communication, Conflict management, Feeling connected, and Overall happiness with one's relationship, all explaining variability in 17 manifest variables. An originally included Sex and Intimacy factor was dropped as a result of model respecifications. The M-QoRS also shows optimal reliability as well as criterion, construct, and known-groups validity. Cross-validation tests also confirm that this structure could be replicated in other samples. Being designed within the context of mobile health (mHealth) apps and digital wellbeing promotion, the scale can be a useful instrument for evaluating online relationships programs and interventions.

BackgroundDespite the effects of poor relationship quality on individuals’, couples’, and families’ well-being, help seeking often does not occur until problems arise. Digital interventions may lower barriers to engagement with preventive relationship care. The Paired app, launched in October 2020, aims to strengthen and enhance couple relationships. It provides daily questions, quizzes, tips, and detailed content and facilitates in-app sharing of question and quiz responses and tagged content between partners. ObjectiveTo explore the potential of mobile health to benefit couple relationships and how it may do this, we examined (1) Paired’s impact on relationship quality and (2) its mechanisms of action. MethodsThis mixed methods evaluation invited Paired subscribers to complete (1) brief longitudinal surveys over 3 months (n=440), (2) a 30-item web-based survey (n=745), and (3) in-depth interviews (n=20). For objective 1, survey results were triangulated to determine associations between relationship quality measures and the duration and frequency of Paired use, and qualitative data were integrated to provide explanatory depth. For objective 2, mechanisms of action were explored using a dominant qualitative approach. ResultsRelationship quality improved with increasing duration and frequency of Paired use. Web-based survey data indicate that the Multidimensional Quality of Relationship Scale score (representing relationship quality on a 0-10 scale) was 35.5% higher (95% CI 31.1%-43.7%; P=.002), at 7.03, among people who had used Paired for >3 months compared to 5.19 among new users (≤1 wk use of Paired), a trend supported by the longitudinal data. Of those who had used Paired for >1 month, 64.3% (330/513) agreed that their relationship felt stronger since using the app (95% CI 60.2%-68.4%), with no or minimal demographic differences. Regarding the app’s mechanisms of action, interview accounts demonstrated how it prompted and habituated meaningful communication between partners, both within and outside the app. Couples made regular times in their day to discuss the topics Paired raised. Daily questions were sometimes lighthearted and sometimes concerned topics that couples might find challenging to discuss (eg, money management). Interviewees valued the combination of fun and seriousness. It was easier to discuss challenging topics when they were raised by the “neutral” app, rather than during stressful circumstances or when broached by 1 partner. Engagement seemed to be enhanced by users’ experience of relationship benefits and by the app’s design. ConclusionsThis study demonstrates proof of concept, showing that Paired may have the potential to improve relationship quality over a relatively short time frame. Positive relationship practices became embedded within couples’ daily routines, suggesting that relationship quality improvements might be sustained. Digital interventions can play an important role in the relationship care ecosystem. The mixed methods design enabled triangulation and integration, strengthening our findings. However, app users were self-selecting, and methodological choices impact our findings’ generalizability.

Digital technologies play an increasing role in intimate couple relationships, prompting new approaches to better understand the contemporary digital relationship landscape. This article uses feminist new materialist assemblage thinking to explore the functioning and processes of a relationship support app, Paired. Deploying diffractive analysis, it presents three composite narratives that explore the temporality of couple relationships, relationship work and situated practices of coupledom. Composite narratives retain the emotional truth of original accounts through combined participant voices, enabling attention to be focused on the user–relationship–app assemblage. Findings suggest that routinised app notifications prompt meaningful everyday relationship maintenance behaviours. Human–technology intra-actions thus generate positive relationship health and wellbeing behaviours which may have lasting benefits. This article’s contributions are therefore largely methodological and conceptual, with analysis of supplementary primary interview data (n=20) derived from a mixed-methods evaluation, including brief longitudinal surveys over three months (n=440) and a detailed survey (n=745).

Long-established studies and scales have advanced understandings of family function, marital satisfaction, and couple relationship quality. The underpinning constructs nevertheless remain under-conceptualized and largely removed from the heuristic of everyday life and the dynamic of contemporary coupledom. We propose that a paradigm shift is required to sufficiently engage with the digital worlds of 21st century intimacies. Ideas in feminist new materialism revitalize the epistemology and ontology of relationship science. This enables a new look at how relationship quality is manifest in and created through human-technology intra-actions. The research tools of feminist new materialism are, however, typically creative and intentionally exploratory. We demonstrate how using a practices approach, which focuses on everyday lived experience, facilitates investigation of multidimensional public-private worlds. We deploy this to build a feminist new materialist analysis of a digital couple intervention. Through this, we develop the concept of more-than-relationship quality.

Sex is perceived as crucial to relationship success. This article reveals how sexual intimacy is part of the relationship work that couples ordinarily complete to sustain their partnerships over time. It problematizes the binary logics of good/bad sex, female/male desire and homo/heterosexual difference and shows how fluctuations of desire and sexual capacity are managed by couples through intimate knowledge. Findings presented here derive from a multiple methods study with 50 long-term heterosexual and LGBTQ partnerships. The article demonstrates how the absence of normative sexual scripts enables queer couples to more readily manage sexual discrepancies. Gendered differences and inequalities persist within many heterosexual relationships while reflexivity and increased openness characterize queer coupledom. Women and LGBTQ couples are more inclined to deploy humour to diffuse difficult situations and in this context gay men are akin to women more so than heterosexual men.

Purpose: Drawing on survey data (N = 7,826) collected in the United Kingdom, Australia, and the United States, this paper examines whether sexual orientation is a differentiating factor in explaining relationship quality and maintenance. Previous research suggests that sexual orientation is not significant in determining relationship satisfaction; however, these analyses have used traditional variable driven approaches, which do not provide an holistic view of the relationship by considering the unique combination of characteristics.Method: In this study, latent profile analyses were used, which is a person-centered approach that allows for identification of different types of long-term relationships.Results: Data suggested that LGB individuals had marginally higher levels of relationship quality compared to their heterosexual counterparts, and sexual orientation was also associated with differing types of long-term relationships.Discussion: These findings are interrogated in more detail, in particular, how sexual orientation is associated with types of long-term relationships and how everyday practices are associated with relationship quality.

This article will explore how LGBTQ+ young people sustain, and in some cases survive, family relationships. We develop the concept of ‘paradoxical family practices’ and use this to demonstrate the ways in which LGBTQ+ young people manage family life through everyday emotion work. This highlights: (1) how families ordinarily navigate heteronormativity and ‘issues’ of gender/sexuality; (2) the efficacy of ‘paradoxical family practices’ as a conceptual tool; (3) the value of emotion-centred multiple qualitative methods to explore the lives of LGBTQ+ young people and mental health. Findings derive from a small-scale UK study funded by the Wellcome Trust (UNS39780) and were generated through a two-stage methodology comprising digital/paper emotion maps and qualitative interviews with LGBTQ+ young people aged 16–25 (n = 12) followed by diary methods and follow-up interviews (n = 9). Interviews were also completed with ‘family members’ (n = 7).

This chapter takes lead from one of the early existential therapists, Medard Boss, who, having originally trained in psychoanalysis, sought to re-imagine the practice of psychoanalysis through phenomenology. It follows the path of Boss in order to re-imagine the visual matrix method through phenomenology rather than object-relations and Deleuzian theory in the service of developing a method for collecting group-level data in phenomenology. The chapter discusses the challenge of a group-level analysis for phenomenology, which has traditionally been concerned with individual first-person experience. It provides more practical detail on the visual matrix method and introduces a project involving authors working with an artist to produce a film series based on a research project on enduring relationships. The chapter presents authors' own analysis of the data produced in the evaluation of the film series, as an exemplar of how to conduct an existential group-level phenomenological analysis of visual matrix data.

There have been great advances in socio-legal queer rights in recent years and many of these have clustered around partnership and parenthood. Whilst these rights are seemingly progressive and welcome, they have not come without a cost. Cultural studies and queer theorising have critically engaged with, and effectively critiqued, these advances. However, in many ways empirical research on “same-sex parenthood” has largely glossed over the problematic of contemporary equality rights and focussed instead on the opportunities presented. Research in this vein typically instantiates heteronormative gender and sexuality through insufficient attention to everyday experiences and the ways in which these queer kinship. Geopolitical and socio-cultural contexts are used as scene-setting rather than being operationalised to prise apart the intersections of public/private intimacies. A genealogy imperative is defining families, with queer practices of conception invoked to separate one family from the next. We may now be better able to understand how we relate to and engage with others and the social world around us, but homogeneity simultaneously occludes the specificity of experience. The clustering of sample-defined groups erases within group differences and obscures the structuring factors that underpin academic scholarship. In this piece, therefore, we ask: In these precarious and paradoxically permissive times, whose lives matter in same-sex parenthood research? To what extent have familial discourses shut down sex and sexuality debates in studies of queer kinship? What exactly, if anything, makes same-sex families queer?

Background LGBTQ +young people experience disproportionately poor mental health outcomes compared to their heterosexual counterparts. Poor mental health is linked to family conflict about sexual orientation whereas supportive family relationships are correlated with mental wellness in LGBTQ +youth. However, little research focuses on family environments for LGBTQ +youth and to date there is no UK evidence on the topic. In addition, both ‘family’ and ‘youth’ remain under-theorised and mental health research typically uses a psycho-biomedical framework where emotion is pathologized. This limits our understanding of the complexity, relationality and meanings of youth mental health. Aim/Objectives This methodological paper will explain the interdisciplinary critical mental health taken to researching LGBTQ+youth and family relationships in a small-scale study in England. Specifically, I will critically reflect on the epistemological and practical aspects of centralising emotion within this research project. Methods Two phases of qualitative research with13 LGBTQ +young people and 7 ‘family members’ was conducted. Phase one involved family mapping and semi-structured interviews; and phase two used diary methods. Emotion mapping techniques were used throughout and an emotion-centred analysis conducted including through the development of ‘I-feel poems’; and drawing on Hochschild’s (1979) concept of ‘emotion work.’ Results Our approach to researching LGBTQ+young people and their families yielded material that was saturated with emotion and highlighted myriad ways that LGBTQ+youth mental health is influenced by doing emotion work in their families for the purposes of becoming, belonging and survival. Conclusions Our method/ology successfully captured emotion and facilitated an emotion-centred analysis of LGBTQ +youth/family relationships. Although it’s likely much emotion remains hidden from view and its exposure presents ethical risks for researcher and participant, this methodological approach offers a valuable alternative perspective on mental health that attends to the meanings and relationality of LGBTQ +youth experience.

The need for social as well as academic impact in social science research is now well established. Art is increasingly being explored as a means of generating social impact, most commonly as a way to engage publics with research findings, but to date with little exploration of the process of engagement itself. In this study, we set out to explore the power of art to engage the public. We do this by examining the ‘affective’ experience of engagement through a qualitative investigation using one-to-one interviews and a modified visual matrix exercise. In this article we report on the findings from our analysis of the affective experience of watching a film series, and through this discuss the use of film to communicate research findings and value of a novel qualitative psychosocial methodology for exploring the process of public engagement.

Over the past few years (2017–19) there has been a steep rise in queer parenthood and same-sex ‘marriage’ along with a significant increase in pet ownership in Western countries. This article explores shifting trends in pet ownership and the ways that young LGBTQ+ couples are planning their futures together, around and through their pets. This futurity and investment in household often serves to consolidate heteronormativity and the traditional discourses of family planning.

Conflict with the family about sexual orientation and gender diversity is a key risk factor associated with poor mental health in youth populations. Findings presented here derive from a UK study that employed an interdisciplinary critical mental health approach that de-pathologised emotional distress and conceptualised families as social and affective units that are created through everyday practices. Our aim was to explore how family relationships foster, maintain or harm the mental health and well-being of LGBTQ+ youth. Data were generated through exploratory visual, creative and digital qualitative methods in two phases. Phase 1 involved digital/paper emotion maps and interviews with LGBTQ+ youth aged 16 to 25 (n = 12) and family member/mentor interviews (n = 7). Phase 2 employed diary methods and follow-up interviews (n = 9). The data analytic strategy involved three stages: individual case analysis, cross-sectional thematic analysis and meta-interpretation. We found that family relationships impacted queer youth mental health in complex ways that were related to the establishment of their autonomous queer selves, the desire to remain belonging to their family and the need to maintain a secure environment. The emotion work involved in navigating identity, belonging and security was made difficult because of family heteronormativity, youth autonomy and family expectations, and had a stark impact on queer youth mental health and well-being. Improving the mental health of LGBTQ+ youth requires a much deeper understanding of the emotionality of family relationships and the difficulties negotiating these as a young person.

This letter seeks to synthesise methodological challenges encountered in a cohort of Wellcome Trust-funded research projects focusing on sexualities and health. The ten Wellcome Trust projects span a diversity of gender and sexual orientations and identities, settings; institutional and non-institutional contexts, lifecourse stages, and explore a range of health-related interventions. As researchers, we originate from a breadth of disciplinary traditions, use a variety of research methods and data sources. Despite this breadth, four common themes are found across the projects: (i) inclusivity, representations and representativeness, (ii) lumping together of diverse groups, (iii) institutions and closed settings (iv) ethical and governance barriers.