Investment in dating relationships.

This dissertation advances a model of the function and content of investment in long-term mating relationships. In developing this model, evolutionary theory served as both a heuristic and predictive tool. It was heuristic in highlighting questions about the function of investment behavior, and in guiding this series of studies toward focusing on the specific qualities, rather than quantity, of investment behavior. More precisely, it led to an examination of specific forms of investment that were theoretically linked to 5 adaptive problems--provisioning, protection, parental nurturance, sexual access, and commitment--encountered by men and women in ancestral environments. It was predictive in generating hypotheses about the structure of investment behavior, sex differences in subjective reactions to loss of investment from a dating partner, sex differences in the use of particular investment strategies in dating relationships, and individual differences in the types of investment that are given and received in dating relationships. In developing my program of research on investment, construct validation and theory testing have occurred hand-in-hand (Cronbach & Meehl, 1955). I propose that the function of relationship-specific investment is to secure access to the long-term social, physical, and energetic resources of a specific mate. The first part of this dissertation explicates this functional model (Chapter 1) and focuses on developing and validating a multi-dimensional measure of investment in romantic relationships (Chapters 2 & 3). Ten dimensions of investment were identified through factor analysis and scaled to form the Relationship-Specific Investment Inventory. These scales form a diverse set of investment measures that are reasonably independent, internally consistent, and reliable across raters. The second part of this dissertation applies this inventory to the study of between- and within-sex variation in patterns of investment in dating relationships. Chapters 3 & 4 test predictions from Trivers' (1972) theory of parental investment and sexual selection about sex differences in performance and assessment of specific investment strategies. Chapter 5 tests predictions from Gangestad and Simpson's (1990) theory of sociosexual variation about individual differences in performance and reception of investment behaviors. These investigations show how a multi-dimensional, adaptationist approach to investment can further our understanding of these differences in patterns of investment.PhDPsychologyUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/104617/1/9542833.pdfDescription of 9542833.pdf : Restricted to UM users only