Religious Conversations and Relational Uncertainty in Romantic Relationships as Mediators of Family Communication Patterns and Young Adults’ Mental Well-being

Abstract

This study examined the degree to which religious conversations and relational uncertainty with a romantic partner mediate the associations between family communication patterns (FCPs) (i.e., conversation and conformity orientations) and young adults’ mental well-being. Participants included 204 young adults currently involved in a romantic relationship. Results indicated that both orientations predict the frequency with which partners engage in conversations about religion and spirituality with romantic partners. Family conformity orientation had a direct effect on mental well-being, whereas conversation orientation had indirect effects on young adults’ mental well-being through religious conversations and relational uncertainty. Theoretically, this study extends FCP theory by demonstrating that relational schemas formed in individuals’ families-of-origin may enhance (or inhibit) their mental well-being via conversational and relational experiences with a romantic partner.

Keywords:

• Conformity
• Conversation
• Family Communication Patterns
• Mental Well-being
• Relational Uncertainty
• Religion

Notes

1. For a detailed discussion of the conceptual and empirical distinctions between these two constructs, please see Zinnbauer et al. (1997). In this study, I was interested in the frequencies with which individuals discussed a variety of both religious (e.g., church and attending worship services) and spiritual topics (e.g., God, spirituality, fate, good and evil, life after death) with their romantic partner. Given a focus on discussions of topics rather than on individual practices of religion and/or spirituality, both terms were included in this report. In addition, in my previous report with my colleagues (McCurry et al., 2012), the unidimensional factor structure that emerged for the 24-item inventory provided further support for using both terms to represent the domain of conversational topics under investigation in this follow-up report.

2. The problematic items included “When I am at home, I am expected to obey my parents’ rules,” “In our home, my parents usually have the last word,” and “When anything really important is involved, my parents expect me to obey without question.”

3. The decision to use PROCESS to test for significant indirect effects was guided by two factors: (1) LISREL 8.80 does not generate accelerated, bias-corrected confidence intervals; and (2) the measures produced high internal reliability estimates, thereby producing negligible differences in the magnitudes of the path estimates in the model (cf. Hayes, Montoya, & Rockwood, 2017).

4. Both reviewers inquired as to whether or not there were differences in the frequency of religious conversations, and in the larger pattern of associations tested here, based on the religious (dis)similarity of the romantic partners. The first investigation to come from these data positioned frequency of religious conversations as one of two dependent variables (McCurry et al., 2012) and found that religious (dis)similarity is inversely, but negligibly associated with frequency of religious conversations (r = −.17, p < .05). Given the negligible effect size between these two variables, the fact that adding it as a potential moderator of the explanatory model advanced in this study would unnecessarily complicate the analyses, and that frequency was positioned in this study as one of two parallel mediators of a completely different set of associations (i.e., between FCPs and mental well-being), I decided not to include religious (dis)similarity between partners as a potential moderator of the hypothesized model in Figure 1.