Romantic Relationships Essay

Individuals involved in romantic relationships often send messages to one another with the intent to convey honest information about their romantic partner. Literature on this topic has already been published, but researcher Shuangyue Zhang found gaps and unanswered questions in this previously conducted research that he wanted to resolve. In 2009, Zhang began researching the hurtful, but honest messages that are sent and received in romantic relationships with two overlapping goals in mind. He wanted to uncover the “motivations and relational consequences of honest, but hurtful evaluated messages,” while simultaneously investigating “the relational satisfaction, sex of the respondent and message types” (Zhang, 2009). With his purpose in place, Zhang developed a hypothesis for his research that stated, “Recipients will interpret honest, but hurtful messages more negatively than will senders” (Zhang 2009). The subjects of Zhang’s study, 515 undergraduate students (32.4% male and 77.6% female) from Midwestern University, were given one of two different questionnaires, “one sender questionnaire and one receiver questionnaire,” and asked to “reconstruct a conversation” that they took part in that involved an honest, but hurtful evaluative message (Zhang, 2009). Participants were then given a scale and asked to rate the hurtfulness, emotional pain and alleged honesty of the message that they recoded (Zhang, 2009). At the conclusion of the study, Zhang measured and assessed the honesty motives, perceived intent and relational ramifications of the messages (Zhang, 2009). The study effectively conducted by Shuangyue Zhang in 2009 not only yielded findings in support of the hypothesis, but also revealed other findings. These other findings...

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... between individuals in romantic relationships. I believe that by using a questionnaire for his research design Zhang was able to collect valid data. However, if I were to conduct a study similar to Zhang’s I would use observational techniques to study the actual interactions between two members of a romantic relationship and the reactions of each member after an honest message has been exchanged, and to eliminate the limitation in the study of subjects had to recall their conversations. The information in this study is applicable to my own life because I myself am in a relationship and know the importance and value of honesty in my relationship. Sometimes our partner may not always express words that we want to hear, but in my opinion sometimes being honest and saying something hurtful is better than lying just to allow someone else to hear what they want to hear.