Enduring love? Un/settling coupledom in the 21st Century

Jacqui Gabb
(The Open University)

Abstract
This talk will introduce the “Enduring Love?” project and its innovative methodology. The “Enduring Love?” project (ESRC) is a psycho-social mixed methods study of couple relationships in contemporary Britain. Presenting findings from the online survey alongside illustrations from the qualitative data, Jacqui Gabb will explore emerging themes from the dataset with particular emphasis on our key analytical foci – gender, generation and parenthood. Her talk will develop the following questions: is there a magic formula that enables some couples to stand the test of time, surviving and thriving through good times and bad? What role do love, affection and sexual intimacy play in women and men’s experience? Does having children enrich or detract from the couple relationship?

A rich palette of qualitative methods enabled her team to drill down into realms of embodied everyday experience using diary writing, emotion maps, individual biographical interviews and couple photo-elicitation interviews. Fieldwork was completed with 50 heterosexual and same-sex couples, aged 18-65 years, living with and without children. The survey questionnaire provides large scale quantitative data, being implemented online using SurveyMonkey. Questions and psychometric scales were deployed to examine relationship quality, the couple relationship, and relationship maintenance. The survey was completed by over 5000 participants.

For more information please see the project website: www.enduringlove.co.uk

Biography
Dr Jacqui Gabb is interested in exploring interdisciplinary approaches for researching and theorizing relationships, with particular interests in the areas of families, relationships, intimacy, emotions, sexuality, gender, and qualitative mixed methods approaches in the study of personal lives. She has completed several empirical research projects in these areas. She is currently working on an ESRC-funded investigation ‘Enduring Love? Couple Relationships in the 21st Century’. This project is a psycho-social mixed methods study into how adults experience, understand and sustain long-term couple relationships. She is also completing a pilot project funded by the British Academy ‘Fragile Fathering: Negotiating Intimacy and Risk in Parenting Practice’, working with colleagues Esther Dermott (University of Bristol) and Brid Featherstone (Open University). She is also Co-editor of the Open Space section in a new international journal published by Policy Press ‘Families, Relationships, Societies’.

Recent research publications include:

• J Gabb (2008) Researching Intimacy in Families. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
• ‘Embodying Risk: Managing Father–child Intimacy and the Display of Nudity in Families’, Sociology, (forthcoming).
   
• ‘Home Truths: Ethical Issues in Family Research’, Qualitative Research, Vol. 10 (4), 2010, pp. 461-478.
   
• ‘Troubling Displays: The Affect of Gender, Sexuality and Class’ in E. Dermott and J. Seymour (eds.) Displaying Families. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, pp. 38-60.
   
• ‘Qualitative Research on LGBT-Parent Families’ in A. E. Goldberg and K. R. Allen (eds.) LGBT-Parent Families: Possibilities for New Research and Implications for Practice. New York: Springer, pp.324-342.