About

Join a long-term study of your romantic relationships and personality today.

We are looking for ALL individuals 18 and older who currently or previously have been in romantic relationships. The LGBTQ+ community has been underserved in relationships and personality research. Therefore, we seek to include ALL PARTNERSHIPS in our discussion of romantic relationships. Improve the story for minorities and learn a little bit about yourself by taking part today! 

We have a system setup for you to fill out relationship questionnaires, personality instruments, and individual differences surveys. Every 30 days, we hope you will come back to take the survey again using a unique link emailed directly to you. 

What is most exciting about our study of relationships is that not only are we seeking to understand everyone’s romantic relationships, we are also hoping to study the development and dynamics of relationships over time. 

With your time and help, we can answer questions like:

  • how your personality relates to relationship functioning;
  • how power in the relationship changes over time;
  • how is equality in power within the relationship achieved and managed? 

MOTIVATION

A long-term study of relationships that is inclusive to all sexualities and gender identities has not yet been done and is needed to adequately represent the whole scope of romantic relationships and partnerships.

FUNDING

We received funding from the Center for Social and Behavioral Sciences Small Health Grant mechanism that has now expired. We will continue to fulfill the research purposes of the grant. We proposed to establish a large, long-running, sexual and gender diverse online sample to address research related to similarities in psychological constructs across groups. The current project is the initial start of what can be a powerful and long-lasting diverse dataset. Right now we are limited in our attention to diverse sexual and gender identities. We can continue to build on diversity to address different relationship styles (open or polyamorous) and intersectional identities (sexuality and gender identity or racial identity and sexuality) in the future.

For the first projects using the POWER study we are committed to testing the similarities of processes of psychosocial variables across sexual and gender diverse respondents. The aim is to support future researchers to not consider diverse identities to be outliers (few and far between and outside the range of the observed associations). Instead, diversity of gender identity or sexuality are normal variations in the human experience that should not be excluded from the average psychological research. Our work is setup to complement the work of queer scholars who look within one group to try to understand the nuanced lived experience of one community and the specific needs of that community.

ABOUT US

We are a group of researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign who are interested in giving representation to minority groups in the conversations surrounding romantic relationships and personality. LGBTQ+ and nonbinary gender identities are a significant portion of the population that have not been well served. There are advantages that may be seen in these communities and strengths that deserve to be studied and shed light on. Our goal is to continue research in the field of romantic relationships that considers EVERYONE to be important to the conversation. 

COMMUNICATION

Check Transparency & Communications for updates. Otherwise, direct all questions to POWER-study@illinois.edu