Sunday, May 18, 2025
5/18/2025
Intimate Relationship Dynamics and Social Health from Early to Established Adulthood - Social health—the quantity and quantity of social ties—is a strong predictor of overall well-being, including both physical and mental health [80,81]. Our goal is to understand how established adulthood (early 30s) social health corresponds to patterns of adverse young adulthood (ages 18-23) intimate relationship experiences (AYREs)—conflict and violent victimization, partner dominance, churning, and partner cheating. We will use three data sources: (1) The NICHD-funded Relationship Dynamics and Social Life (RDSL) project’s existing 2.5 years of weekly longitudinal survey data on a random sample of 992 18- and 19-year-old women living in a county in Michigan, (2) Existing in-depth interviews with a disadvantaged sub-sample of 75 RDSL respondents who experienced a pregnancy or had high model-based propensity for pregnancy. And (3) New in-depth re-interviews of the disadvantaged subsample. The subsample is especially important because their children (n=66 total children by the end of RDSL) will experience their mothers’ AYREs as adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), which are strongly linked to long-term impaired mental and physical health. For our first aim, we will first use sequence analysis methods and the existing survey data (n=942 ever- partnered respondents) to identify and describe theoretically meaningful, and empirically representative patterns of AYREs. Next, we will use the existing RDSL in-depth interview data (n=75) to describe the respondents and their AYREs within each pattern observed in the disadvantaged subsample, in detail. And we will compare the patterns present in the subsample against all of the patterns present in the main sample to assess selectivity in AYREs for respondents with disadvantaged family background, young pregnancy, and associated adolescent experiences with penile-vaginal sex and pregnancy. For our second aim, we will collect and analyze new in-depth re-interviews with the high-risk subsample (n=75), focused on social health. We will compare social health across the AYRE patterns from Aim 1 that are present in the high-risk subsample, to test our overarching hypothesis that AYREs correspond to poorer established adulthood social health, net of disadvantage. We will identify respondents whose experiences do not match our hypotheses—“surprising” results—using an abductive approach to generate new ideas and explain/interpret the context and meaning of the in-depth interview data. Our proposed project is innovative in its: (1) focus on life course changes in a broad range of intimate relationships, including non-marital and non-coresidential relationships; (2) expansion of the ACE framework to incorporate AYREs; (3) an innovative data reduction technique (sequence analysis) to summarize up to 130 weeks of data on eight weekly varying measures of AYREs for 942 respondents, (4) focus on a disadvantaged and important subpopulation to “control for” disadvantage, an important potential confounder of a link between AYREs and social health, and (5) an innovative approach to theory generation (abductive analysis).
HHS’ Tracking Accountability in Government Grants System (TAGGS) website provides access to detailed descriptions of grants, loans, aggregated direct payments and other types of financial assistance awarded by the HHS Operating Divisions (OPDIVs) and the Office of the Secretary Staff Divisions (STAFFDIVs).