The Healthy Relationships Knowledge Exchange Fellowship

About the project

The COVID crisis has put couple relationships under tremendous strain. Through the secondment of the Knowledge Exchange Fellow (Dr Jan Ewing) to OnePlusOne (OPO), a leading national relationship support charity, the project will collect and co-analyse a further round of longitudinal couple data five years on which will be drawn from interviews with the two couple samples available from the Shackleton Relationship Project.

Tracking a sample of married couples over a 15 year period and a more diverse sample of same-sex and opposite-sex/ married, civil-partnered or cohabiting couples over a 5 year period will enable us to understand how intact couples have coped (or not) with COVID relationship stress as compared with other stresses previously experienced (e.g. the financial crash in 2008). The findings will be used to test and adapt Relationship Capability models, being developed by OPO and develop digital relationship education materials with and for OPO, for couples to use nationwide. Together this should help to improve the relationship capabilities of couples faced with challenges to reduce conflict by managing relationship stress and crisis better.

Research team

Anne Barlow (University of Exeter) and Jan Ewing (University of Exeter) with OnePlusOne

Funder

ESRC IAA Knowledge Exchange Fellowship (01.0122 to 31.1222) (£15,000)