Relationship essays

Culture

AO1:

• 2 types of cultures into romantic relationships.
• One is individualistic culture, the second, collectivist culture
• A individualistic culure sees the welfare of the individual as more important than the group as a whole as is commonly found in countries such as America and Britain. Indiviualistic culture has emphasis on freedom of choice (e.g- partners are freely chosen and if relationship is unhappy it's only the alliance between the two partners that is broken.
• In contrast a collectivist culture considers the welfare of the group as more important than the individual and is most commonly found in countries such as Japan and India. In the collectivist culture partners are mainly chosen by others (e.g families) and relationships are permanent and are an alliance between two families or social groups. 

AO2/3

• Evidence by Moore and Leung supporting the theory. It was found that when studying a group of 106 collectivist students (chinese students) and a group of 212 individualistic students (Australian students) 61% of the individualistic studetns were in a romantic relationhship in comparison to just 38% of collectivist students being in a romantic relationship. This seems to suggest that there are more romantic relationships in individualistic cultures. It supports the suggestion that there are cultural differences in relationships and this increases the internal validity of the study.
• However, the evidence by Moore and Leung has been criticised for containing a methodological flaw. Moore and Leung contained a sample of almost double the amount of students from the individualist culture than the colectivist cultures which means that the sample  used was not fair and the findings will not be either. . Findings are therefore weakened by not taking into account the sample issue and the internal validity of the study is also weakend.
• The theory also contains opposing evidence by Pinker (2008) who found that romantic love is evolved to promote survival and reproduction among human beings, and thus considered love to be universal. Pinker suggests that romantic relationships are a form of an evolutionary process and is universal and so occurs in every type of culture. Therefore Pinker opposes the theorys ideas of that romantic relationships differ between cultures and thus decreases the theorys internal validity.
• The theory contains a further piece of supporting evidence by Gutah and Singh (1982) who found that love marriages reported feelings of happiness in the early stages of their relationship, yet depleted overtime, whilst those in arranged marriages reported low levels of love in the early stages which increased overtime. Findings covered both cultures of the collectivist culture and individualistic culture and found that there were differences within the romantic relationships of the two different cultures. This therefore supports the idea that relationships differ between cultures and so the internal validit of the theory is strengthened.
• Psychologists propose that the theory can be criticised for failing to consider the role of nature. As research has shown that romantic love can be considered as human universal and thus evident in all relationships within cross…