“Stick to the Script:” Adolescent Relationship Inauthenticity and Romantic Relationships over the Transition to Adulthood

Citation

Arocho, Rachel; Halpern, Carolyn T.; & Guo, Guang (2019). “Stick to the Script:” Adolescent Relationship Inauthenticity and Romantic Relationships over the Transition to Adulthood. Population Association of America annual meeting. Austin, TX.

Abstract

Adolescent romantic relationship experiences are associated with relationship experiences later in life. This study focuses on the implications of adolescent relationship “inauthenticity”– mismatch between the content of ideal and real relationships – for relationship quality and intimate partner violence in young adulthood using Waves I, II, and IV from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health). We compare adolescents’ ideal relationship sequences, reported in Wave I, and the sequences of real relationships, from Wave II, using optimal matching sequence analyses to measure inauthenticity. We then use inauthenticity to predict relationship quality and intimate partner violence in young adulthood (ages 24-32) with attention to differences by gender and race/ethnicity. Overall, adolescent relationship inauthenticity did not consistently predict young adult relationship quality by any measure in overall or stratified models. It seems that adolescent relationship inauthenticity does not carry forward through respondents’ later relationships.

URL

http://paa2019.populationassociation.org/abstracts/190683

Reference Type

Conference proceeding

Book Title

Population Association of America annual meeting

Author(s)

Arocho, Rachel
Halpern, Carolyn T.
Guo, Guang

Year Published

2019

City of Publication

Austin, TX

Reference ID

7287