Relationship course theory: An interdisciplinary integrative proposition to address the complexification of interpersonal relationships
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Researchers have been observing a complexification of interpersonal relationships in contemporary societies. However, current theoretical perspectives on relationships fall short of comprehensively grasping increasingly diverse and fluid relationship types (e.g., friends with benefits, polyamory, living‐apart‐together, coparenting, etc.) and patterns of change. In an attempt to meet the need for more integrative and interdisciplinary theorizing, this paper introduces a first outline of relationship course theory to better comprehend the complexity of relationships. In contrast to previous theoretical perspectives that conceptualize relationships as a single trajectory, I posit that the course of a relationship is composed of multiple intertwined trajectories, each of which stemming from differentiated domains such as sexuality, friendship, love, family, domesticity, and occupation. These relationship domains constitute a metatypology from which to examine the multiple sets of meanings and temporalities that intertwine throughout the course of a relationship. I propose that relationships are defined based on the combination of relationship domains, with different iterations and permutations of these domains producing various relationship configurations. Furthermore, the theory defines three levels of relationship courses: Sociocultural (i.e., stories that circulate about relationships in given sociocultural contexts), interpersonal (i.e., stories that individuals co‐construct about the particular relationships they experience), and life courses (i.e., stories that individuals co‐construct about themselves as relational beings). This proposition will hopefully stimulate the theoretical conversation on the complexity of relationships and foster dialogue between researchers from different theoretical and disciplinary affiliations.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".