Postdoctoral Fellowship: SPRF: Compatibility in Emerging Relationships

This award was provided as part of NSF's Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences (SBE) Postdoctoral Research Fellowships (SPRF) program. The goal of the SPRF program is to prepare promising, early career doctoral-level scientists for scientific careers in academia, industry or private sector, and government. SPRF awards involve two years of training under the sponsorship of established scientists and encourage Postdoctoral Fellows to perform independent research. NSF seeks to promote the participation of scientists from all segments of the scientific community, including those from underrepresented groups, in its research programs and activities; the postdoctoral period is considered to be an important level of professional development in attaining this goal. Each Postdoctoral Fellow must address important scientific questions that advance their respective disciplinary fields. Under the sponsorship of Drs. Amie Gordon and Elizabeth Bruch at the University of Michigan, this postdoctoral fellowship award supports an early career scientist examining the science of compatibility. Predicting unique compatibility between two people at the beginning of their relationship is still a scientific mystery. Further, certain segments of the population have been largely excluded from existing research on compatibility and relationship initiation. This work will use an innovative mobile dating application developed for research to help relationship scientists better understand what gives rise to compatibility in diverse, emerging relationships. In particular, the focus of the project is on investigating why some “matches” translate into successful real-world relationships, as well as how this relationship formation differs among a variety of relationship types. This will be one of the first comprehensive investigations of romantic relationship progression and dating behavior that attempts to understand emerging relationships among individuals with diverse identities. This proposal leverages a novel, innovative, and ecologically-valid application designed by relationship scientists for research purposes—to address critical questions about 1) the factors that contribute to compatibility and 2) how compatibility shapes relationship progress. An application-based research study is the ideal context in which to study compatibility because a) the applications will allow for real-time measurements of compatibility as new relationships progress, b) users will provide multiple reports, allowing for testing of unique compatibility between dyads, and c) this context may make it more accessible for diverse groups which promotes knowledge and generalizability. This proposal seeks to answer three research questions: 1) what gives rise to compatibility in early relationship interactions?, 2) does early compatibility forecast later relationship formation, through a) the growth of compatibility over time and b) important affective and behavioral signals of relational progression, and 3) similarities and differences between groups. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.