Comprobación/ Ajuste de las funciones de teodolito Puntos de ajuste

Couple cultural identity, the new variable, has been closely looked at in section 2.4. The measurement for couple cultural identity will be looked at in section 5.3.

The next three sections will look at love, satisfaction, and couple cultural identity, and the measurement for each of them that will be used in the quantitative study. The last section of this chapter will present the quantitative study.

5.2 Love and its measurement for the quantitative study

Love was frequently mentioned as a factor that contributed to commitment in the interview study. But what is love, what are the characteristics of love? This section will explore the different definitions of love and find the most suitable concept and

measurement of love for the quantitative study.

Love has been an eternal subject for research, novels, poems, dramas, music and daily talks among ordinary people, but it seems not easy to see the whole picture of love, as according to Rubin (1988), different individuals have different understandings of love. Can love be looked at only through feelings or behaviours? According to Murstein

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(1988), feelings can be changed and behaviours can be misinterpreted, and according to Fromm (1957), love is more than intense feelings.

Instead of only looking through the intensity of love, Lee (1988) looked at love as different love-styles, namely eros (passionate love), storge (friendship), ludus (game playing), and the different combinations of the three styles (e.g. mania, pragma, agape). However the love-styles can be changed throughout the lifetime and people can have multiple love-styles at the same time (ibid).

Shaver et al. (1988) looked at love as attachment, which originated from the attachment between infant and the caregiver, and secure, anxious/ambivalent and avoidant were the attachment styles between lovers. Love was also looked at through evolutionary point of view, in which the goal was to increase “reproductive success” (p. 100) and love was acted through resource displaying, exclusion, “Commitment and Marriage”, “Sexual Intimacy”, “Reproduction”, Resource Sharing”, and “Parental Investment” (Buss, 1988, p. 101-109).

In the current research, love is a factor for commitment, so the love-styles,

attachment styles and the evolutionary goals are not the main focus. Instead, Sternberg’s triangular theory of love, Rubin’s measurement of love, and the relationship between love and commitment will be looked at next. Finally, the measurement for the

quantitative study will be presented.

5.2.1 The triangular theory of love (Sternberg, 1986, 2004)

According to Sternberg’s (1986) triangular theory of love, love was looked as “a complex whole” (p. 120) and it could be looked at through three components, which were “intimacy”, “passion”, and “decision/commitment” (p. 119). Intimacy is the “feelings of closeness, connectedness, and bondedness in loving relationships” (p. 214); passion is “the drives that lead to romance, physical attraction, sexual consummation, and related phenomena in loving relationships” (p. 214); decision/commitment is the decision to love someone and the commitment to keep the love or the relationship, and decision/commitment has control over the development of intimacy and passion (Sternberg, 2004). Sternberg (1997) developed a scale for his theory and the questions for intimacy were “I have a comfortable relationship with ___”, “I feel that ___ really understands me” (p. 329), “I feel emotionally close to ___” (p. 318) and so on;

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questions for passion were “I adore ___”, “Just seeing ___ is exciting for me” (p. 318), “I find ___ to be very personally attractive” (p. 329) and so on; questions for

commitment were “I view my relationship with ___ as permanent” (p. 318), “I feel a sense of responsibility toward ___”, “I plan to continue in my relationship with ___” (p. 329) and so on. In this theory, love refers to any type of love and all the components are important to a loving relationship such as a romantic relationship, a child-parent

relationship, or a friendship (Sternberg, 1986). However certain component(s) are more significant than others in different types of relationships, for example, intimacy

component exists in any type of loving relationships but passion component is likely to exist in romantic relationships (ibid). Sternberg’s (1997) scale for his theory showed that the three components were highly correlated to each other (r was around .80 for lovers and around .90 for ideal lovers) in romantic relationships, which indicated that the three components may mean the same thing. Sternberg’s (1997) scale for

commitment included all three types of commitment defined by Johnson (1991). So personal commitment, the commitment that the quantitative study will be looking at, may not have the same strong correlations with passion and intimacy as Sternberg’s (1997) commitment does.

5.2.2 Rubin’s (1970) measurement of romantic love

Rubin (1970) developed a love scale according to the literature about the “nature of love” (p,. 266) and “interpersonal attraction” (p. 266) that described love in comply with the assumption that “love is an attitude held by a person toward a particular other person, involving predispositions to think, feel, and behave in certain ways toward that other person” (p. 265), and the love was focused on romantic love, which meant the love between male-female pairs who were dating and might have the possibility of marriage. A liking scale was also developed to be distinguished from the love scale. One hundred and ninety-eight university students were asked to rate on the love scale and the liking scale, with the further categorisation by students and university faculty, for both lovers and platonic opposite-sex friends, and the highly loaded 13 items for love and 13 items for liking in factor analyses were selected for the final love scale and liking scale (Rubin, 1970). There were three components in the love scale although love was treated as a whole concept: “Affiliative and dependent need” (e.g. “if I could never

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be with ___, I would feel miserable”), “Predisposition to help” (e.g. “I would do almost anything for ___”) and “Exclusiveness and absorption” (e.g. “I feel very possessive toward ___”) (Rubin, 1970, p. 267-268). The final love scale and liking scale were distributed to 158 dating couples, and it was found that the alpha reliability of the love scale was very high (.84 and .86 for women and men respectively), love for the dating partner was much stronger than love for same-sex friends, and love (measured by the love scale) was highly correlated with the possibility of marriage but not the length of dating (Rubin, 1970).

5.2.3 The relations between love and commitment

In Sternberg’s (1986, 2004) theory, commitment was looked as a part of love, but Rubin (1970) did not include commitment into the concept of love. So, are love and commitment the same or different?

Love does relate to commitment as Lund (1985, p. 5-6) described “love and commitment usually go hand in hand in modern relationships”. Research also showed the strong correlations between love and commitment (e.g. Fletcher, Simpson, & Thomas, 2000).

Kelley (1983) looked at love and commitment through two dimensions, with one dimension of 1) positive forces that hold two people together and 2) the rest forces (e.g. constrains) that hold two people together, and the other dimension of the stable and unstable state of the first dimension, and these two dimensions made four categories. Kelley (1983) located 1) love on two categories as “a particular subset of the positive factors that draw and hold people together” (p. 267), in which the positive forces that hold two people together can be stable and unstable; 2) commitment on two categories, including the stable positive and the rest forces that hold two people together. There is a category for love does not include commitment, and although love and commitment overlap in one category, there is a category for commitment does not include love.

When people talking about romantic love, would commitment be considered as a part of love by most people? Lund (1985) separated commitment, the wish to keep a relationship going, from love, “positive feelings” (p. 3) toward a certain person in a close relationship, and a factor analysis of all the items of her commitment scale and Rubin’s (1970) love scale showed that items in commitment scale had higher factor

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loadings in factor one than in factor two, and items in love scale had higher factor loadings in factor two than in factor one, which meant the two scales were separated scales. In Lund’s (1985) factor analysis, there were two items had relatively low factor loadings than other items in the commitment scale, and the possible reason might be that the two items were related to what Johnson (1991) called moral commitment and structural commitment. The current research is looking at personal commitment, and all the items related to this type of commitment in Lund’s (1985) commitment scale were highly loaded in factor one; personal commitment and Rubin’s (1970) love scale were shown as distinct from each other. Lund (1985) found that commitment significantly correlated with the length of the relationship and the stage of the relationship (such as seriously involved, engaged) but love did not show such significant correlations with these two variables.

5.2.4 Summary and the measurement of love for the quantitative study

Like culture, which has been discussed in chapter one, love is also complicated, and it is hard to make an exhaustive list of all the elements of love, as all the elements of love relate to each other. In Johnson et al.’s (1999) study, measurement of love consisted of only two items, which might be too general. Rubin’s (1970) love scale focused on romantic love and was generated from empirical studies, but Sternberg’s (2004) triangular theory of love was on all types of love (e.g. brotherly love, romantic love, parental love) and was not generated from empirical studies. The commitment in Sternberg’s theory of love included personal, moral and structural commitment and his research showed strong correlations between commitment, intimacy, and passion, so intimacy and passion components may contain moral and structural elements, which is out of the scope of the current research. Besides, Lund’s (1985) research supported that love is distinct from commitment.

Therefore, Rubin’s (1970) concept of love and his love scale will be used in the quantitative study. The items in the love scales will be rated from 1 (not at all

true/disagree completely) to 9 (definitely true/agree completely) and the items are: “if my partner were feeling badly, my first duty would be to cheer him (her) up”, “I feel that I can confide in my partner about virtually everything”, “I find it easy to ignore my partner’s faults”, “I would do almost anything for my partner”, “I feel very possessive toward my partner”, “if I could never be with my partner, I would feel miserable”, “if I

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were lonely, my first thought would be to seek my partner out”, “one of my primary concerns is my partner’s welfare”, “I would forgive my partner for practically anything”, “I feel responsible for my partner’s well-being”, “when I am with my partner, I spend a good deal of time just looking at him (her)”, “I would greatly enjoy being confided in by my partner”, “it would be hard for me to get along without my partner” (adapted from Rubin, 1970, p. 267).