Assessing social relationships in adolescents and adults: Constructing and validating the Affective Relationships Scale

Abstract

We propose an Affective Relationships Scale (ARS), specifically constructed to describe core and relatively stable social relationships among people of both genders and of a wide range of ages, from adolescents to adults. The ARS assesses the personal frameworks within which individuals organise their multiple social relationships, by assigning psychological functions to significant others. In Study 1, the ARS among 279 female college students was examined for its factorial validity, to confirm that it reflected normative trends of social relationships that had been documented by previous research(e.g. affective needs toward friends would be stronger than towards parents; “Giving nurture” would be sought more strongly than “Seeking proximity”); and to classify individual patterns of personal frameworks. Study 2 examined the ARS’s convergent and discriminant validity by correlating its scores with those of other psychological measures for 142 female college students. In Study 3, the examination of ARS among a total of 1399 participants of both genders from adolescence to middle-age showed its applicability to males and over a wide age range. Two salient characteristics of the ARS, the delineation of individual patterns of social relationships, and the applicability to different cultures, are discussed.