Thank you for your feedback, Dr. Palmwood! When we first began to plan this study, we had a particular interest in Positive Psychology and we considered looking at other potential moderators, such as well-being or self-esteem. However, we encountered fewer research studies on authenticity, so we thought it would be more interesting to focus on the potential effect that had on the relationship between conformity to feminine gender norms and relationship satisfaction. I like your suggestion that male partner endorsement of feminine gender norms could affect heterosexual relationship satisfaction. I can definitely see how that has the potential to have a moderating effect and I would be very interested to see how that plays out in a follow-up study. We did think that 100 participants was too small of a sample size, but I’m glad to see that the amount was more substantial than we thought!

Professor Palmwood! I am so happy to see you commented! In the final APA paper, I mentioned that possible future research could be applied to studying men. Interestingly enough, while doing research for this project we found so many articles on masculine gender norms; therefore, we decided to do some research on feminine gender norms. We did consider alternate moderators, we initially considered another positive psychology concept, well-being, as a moderator. We also considered religiosity as a moderator in the relationship between conformity to feminine gender norms and relationship satisfaction; however, the amount of applicable research we could have used was so limited that we dumped the idea.

Dr. Palmwood, thank you so much for your thoughts. In my limitations and future directions section, I talked about how it would be beneficial for researchers to consider implementing male identifying participants to determine if masculine gender norms would have had an impact on relationship satisfaction. I am very curious as to how a study would look like in respect masculine gender norms, how that could represent male partner endorsement, and how that may affect relationship satisfaction.

That is true!! In some studies, 100+ is a lot! I am very grateful for the UMW participant pool. In our case, a limitation in our study was that a variable such as authenticity could have a cluster effect. In the future, getting a larger sample size would alleviate this limitation and may even offer different results in respect to authenticity as a moderating variable to conformity to feminine gender norms.

Thank you for your feedback, Dr. Schiffrin! One would think that individuals who conform to feminine gender norms and also live inauthentically would be less satisfied with their romantic relationship. So, it was surprising to find that authenticity did not in fact have a moderating role in that relationship. I also think it is possible that partners’ gender identities and their perceptions of feminine gender roles could lead to different outcomes. It would be interesting if future researchers took a closer look at the potential effects of those variables on relationship satisfaction.

Dr. Schiffrin,

That is what I struggled with comprehending as well. In our case, yes that is ultimately what our results came down to. Those who conformed to feminine gender norms would ultimately be more satisfied in their relationships. Spit balling; it may be easier to conform with feminine gender norms as a women and be happier. We suggested in our discussion and limitations section on our papers that future researchers look at both genders to make direct gender comparisons on relationship satisfaction.

Thanks for commenting professor Schiffrin! Yes, given that authenticity and conformity to feminine gender norms both had an independent significant effect on relationship satisfaction, we were surprised the interaction was not significant. You are right, a big part of our research was the basis that women who conform to feminine gender norms would have higher relationship satisfaction; however, only if they were doing so authentically. I would certainly think that the attitude one partner in a relationship has for their partner would have an effect on the way survey questioned were answered. I like how you mentioned the possibility of a difference in results based on the gender of the participants’ partners. During the discussion part of my APA paper, I brought up the possibility of a similar study being replicated with LGBTQ individuals. The partners of the participants in our study were 93% male (this was expected, yet it is not diverse). Perhaps authenticity might have a moderating effect when studying LGBTQ individuals-given that their life experiences have been different than that of participants who are for the majority straight.

Thank you for your feedback! Once we finished analyzing our data and noticed that most of our participants were in heterosexual relationships, we also began to think about how non-heterosexual relationships could have lead to different outcomes. If we had a larger sample size, perhaps we could have considered this. I think that would be a very interesting aspect for future researchers to look at!

Aidan,

Thank you so much. We actually have twice as much participants but after cleaning up our data to remove ineligible or incomplete participants, we ended up with 115! That is a limitation we discussed in our study. Unfortunately, due to our limited time constraint, we were unable to take data on different types of relationships but we advised future researchers to consider this to make it more generalizable.

Hi Aidan, thanks for taking the time to comment on our study. I’ve noticed that a lot of people in the comments have suggested that an interesting future research topic could be studying conformity to masculine gender norms; therefore, alluding to the possibility that data collected on men might yield different results; this is a valid and interesting thought. I also mentioned conducting the research on various types of relationships, or at the least having more diversity in relationship types. I will say that we did not have control of the gender identities of participants’ partners; however, a study narrowing in on LGBTQ individuals could be very interesting to compare to data like ours (where 93% of women who responded were in a straight relationship)

Maya,

I can imagine that family dynamics could be a potential moderator! When we think about what we have learned in our class, culture has shown that generationally there are aspects of life that are passed down such as gender norms. That could very well tie into it, it is just a matter of does it have significant weight.

Thanks Maya! Yes given that both the predictor variable (conformity to feminine gender norms) and the moderating variable (authenticity) both had an effect on relationship satisfaction, we were also surprised to find that the interaction between them did not have an effect on relationship satisfaction. Childhood family dynamic is a really interesting potential moderator-I can already think of a way childhood family dynamics would affect both the way one feels towards the expression of gender norms and the importance of authenticity. Some upbringings prioritize authenticity, while others prioritize conformity to gender norms. Relationship satisfaction would absolutely be affected by the way one was raised-great idea Maya 🙂

Hi Alyssa! We wondered similarly what a minimum of 3 months might do to impact/lessen how many participants we could have had. That was an aspect of our study that we had to make an educated guess on, to say it as bluntly as possible. To explain our reasoning for deciding on 3 months minimum on the relationship: we wanted to collect data on couples who were “serious enough” but did not want to make it too long to the point where we would cut off a large part of potential data (15% of our participants were in a relationship for 3-6 months).

Based on research in authenticity, those who are older may have higher scores in authenticity. So based just on this, that may influence how older persons may carry themselves and choose a more compatible match!

Thank you so much.

Hi Alyssa! Thanks for taking the time to watch/comment on our study. We definitely deliberated over the minimum amount of time participants were required to be in a relationship for. We ultimately settled on three months because we worried that if we made the minimum length too long, we would not get many participants given that college-aged students are often single and/or in new relationships. We also felt that three-months of time was a long enough amount of time, given the questions asked in the Satisfaction of Couple Relationship Scale. We had a very wide range of ages, which was awesome, ranging from 18-80; however, with a mean of 21. Yes, there is a great deal of research involving authenticity’s role in friendship satisfaction, so that would definitely be a very interesting thing to research.

Nice question Nancy! We were interested in the field of positive psychology-where the term authenticity originates from. We initially considered well-being, which is another positive psychology term; however, research was extremely limited. As far as society helping…that is a tricky one given so much of the mainstream media leads us away from living authentic lives. In order to promote authenticity in our society, we must endorse a Eudaimonic sense of happiness, which entails the concept that life has both good and bad, suffering and pleasure, balance and at times disbalance; therefore, reinforcing the idea that life cannot be perfect teaches us to except, work on ourselves, and thus achieve higher levels of happiness.

Hey Caroline!

We decided to recruit women exclusively because so much prior research existed on the effects of male-gender conformity; however, the research on feminine-gender conformity was much more scarce. We were interested to see how indicative of relationship satisfaction women’s’ perceptions of themselves were.

Yes! Gina also took positive psychology, so that was our inspiration for including authenticity in the research. There could definitely have been some interesting social comparisons, such as comparing one’s relationship to the relationships of others, and how that plays a role in relationship satisfaction. Thanks for your compliment!

Corrianna,

I took Positive Psychology in the Winter term and it was such a fulfilling course for me. When Eva and I discovered that we both took that class, we knew that it would be a great way to interweave learning connections between both classes. I believe social comparisons would have actually have been another great moderator to look at. There was a theory we found in Donaghue and Fallon’s (2003) research called the social identity theory. It looked at how traditions in culture played a role in how people formed social groups. Through the traditions created and the stereotypes formed about said groups (like being female or being male), judgements and expectations of other same-sex relationships were perpetuated by inequalities possibly created in relationships between women and men due to gender-role stereotyping. It was also a predictor to relationship satisfaction in that study! Therefore, I think in future research social comparisons could very well bear significant results as a moderator to feminine gender norms!

Hi Hannah! Thank you, and thanks for your interesting question. Based on initial gut feelings, I would say yes; however, based on the fact that authenticity had a significant effect on relationship satisfaction, I think it could be argued that the degree of authenticity one feels is more predictive of relationship satisfaction than conformity to gender norms. For example, I think it could very well be likely that a transwoman, who feels high levels of authenticity in life, would score higher on relationship satisfaction than a cisgender woman with low authenticity.