Adolescent Romantic Relationship Partners, Characteristics, Satisfaction, and Commitment

According to Self-Determination Theory (SDT), individuals are motivated by three psychological needs: relatedness, competence, and autonomy. These needs can be met or challenged through the characteristics of one's romantic partner and relationships, leading to healthy outcomes such as satisfaction. In this study, SDT was applied to assess the extent to which underlying needs are important to middle adolescent romantic relationship desires, experiences, and outcomes. This study had two key aims: to assess the importance of developmentally-salient partner characteristics and to assess the adequacy with which partner characteristics and relationship characteristics account for the relationship outcomes of satisfaction and commitment among middle adolescents. Survey data were collected from 235 adolescents (M_age= 15.66; SD = 1.08) who were currently or recently in romantic relationships. A new measure of developmentally-salient partner characteristics was created for this study and functioned largely as expected, though partner intimacy and social status emerged as a single factor rather than as distinct factors. Adolescent relationships were generally healthy as indicated through relatively high ratings of partner personality (which includes expression of intimacy and social status), partner autonomy support, relationship intimacy, relationship passion, and low ratings of relationship abuse. As hypothesized, partner characteristics that more directly serve underlying needs (i.e., personality, identity support, autonomy support) were predictive of relationship outcomes, while those that indirectly serve needs (i.e., attractiveness) or do not serve needs (i.e. financial status) were not. Further, relationship characteristics of intimacy, passion, and abuse were related to, yet distinct from, partner characteristics and explained a significant proportion of additional variance in outcomes. Taken together, the extent to which partners and relationships can serve underlying needs was important to well-being as indicated through the outcomes of relationship satisfaction and commitment. The relations among partner and relationship characteristics and between these and outcomes add credence to the assertion that romantic relationships can be healthy contexts for adolescent development.