“Stick to the Script:” Adolescent Relationship Inauthenticity and Romantic Relationships Over the Transition to Adulthood

Rachel Arocho , University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Carolyn Tucker Halpern, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Guang Guo, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Adolescent romantic relationship experiences are associated with relationship experiences later in life. This study focuses on the implications of adolescent relationship “inauthenticity”– mismatch between the content of ideal and real relationships – for relationship quality and intimate partner violence in young adulthood using Waves I, II, and IV from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health). We compare adolescents’ ideal relationship sequences, reported in Wave I, and the sequences of real relationships, from Wave II, using optimal matching sequence analyses to measure inauthenticity. We then use inauthenticity to predict relationship quality and intimate partner violence in young adulthood (ages 24-32) with attention to differences by gender and race/ethnicity. Overall, adolescent relationship inauthenticity did not consistently predict young adult relationship quality by any measure in overall or stratified models. It seems that adolescent relationship inauthenticity does not carry forward through respondents’ later relationships.

See paper

 Presented in Session 41. New Perspectives on Partnership Formation in the United States