Relational Uncertainty, Parent Involvement, and Conversations about the State of the Relationship as Predictors of Relational Turbulence in Romantic Relationships

ABSTRACT

This study investigated how parent involvement (i.e., parent interference and facilitation) moderates the direct and indirect associations between young adults’ relational uncertainty and turbulence vis-à-vis communication about the state of their romantic relationship. Participants included 264 young adults currently involved in a romantic relationship. Results indicated that parent interference and facilitation are associated with the valence of young adults’ conversations with their romantic partner about relational state. The extent to which parent involvement alters communication between romantic partners depends on how much the young adult values their parent’s opinion. Importantly, the indirect association between relational uncertainty and turbulence through communication valence depended upon parent interference and facilitation, which was further conditioned by whether the child valued their parent’s opinions about their romantic relationship. An important contribution of this study is the illumination of a tension between parent-child and child-partner relationships that may function as a boundary condition for relational turbulence.

KEYWORDS:

• Relational turbulence
• parent interference
• parent facilitation
• relational uncertainty
• communication engagement
• communication valence

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Although RTT positions RU and partner interference/facilitation as predictors of communication episodes and relational turbulence, in the present study, we substituted parent interference/facilitation and focused only on RU for two reasons. First, given the breadth and scope of RTT, Solomon et al. (2016) encouraged researchers to focus their empirical tests on specific pathways rather than on the entire model specified by the theory. Second, we wanted to test whether parent involvement and the degree to which the child valued the parent’s opinions functioned as boundary conditions for the paths from RU to turbulence vis-à-vis relationship talk. Including partner interference and facilitation would have added an unnecessary and unwieldy degree of complexity to our hypothesized model and reporting of results.

2. Given the origins of RTT, one reviewer asked whether relational length was curvilinearly associated with RU. We observed small but significant curvilinear associations between length and both RU (r = −.19, p < .01) and turbulence (r = −.12, p = .046), the latter of which was negligible in effect size. Including curvilinear terms for relational length did not alter the pattern of effects reported in our primary analyses, and thus, we chose not to add them to our conditional parallel mediation models.

3. We wanted to classify and interpret significant interaction effects using Holbert and Park’s (2020) terminology. Thus, we chose to use Aiken and West’s (1991) technique to probe significant interaction effects. Although PROCESS offers the Johnson-Neyman technique for decomposing significant interactions, our use of a moderated moderated mediation model precluded point estimates using this technique.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Emily Stager

Emily Stager (M.S., Texas Christian University) is a recent alum of TCU.

Paul Schrodt

Paul Schrodt (Ph.D., University of Nebraska – Lincoln) is the Philip J. and Cheryl C. Burguières Professor and Graduate Director in the Department of Communication Studies at Texas Christian University.