• Is "Seeing Me, Seeing You" in Couple Reports of Hostility and Support? A Confirmatory Factor Analysis of Young Couples
  Presented by: Fredrick O. Lorenz, Janet N. Melby, Rand D. Conger

• Recession Jitters Among Professional Class Families: Perceptions of Economic Strain and Family Adjustments
  Presented by: Anisa M. Zvonkovic, KyungHee Lee, Erika D. Brooks, NaYeon Lee

Is "Seeing Me, Seeing You" in Couple Reports of Hostility and Support? A Confirmatory Factor Analysis of Young Couples
Presented by: Fredrick O. Lorenz, Janet N. Melby, Rand D. Conger

Social norms are often cited as the cause of many social phenomena, especially as an explanation for behaviors seen as prosocial.  And yet, maybe we love the idea of social norms too much to subject them to rigorous test.  Compared to the detail in social norms theoretical orientations, there is very little detail in tests of these theories.  In order to provide guidance to researchers who invoke social norms as explanations, we catalog normative orientations that have been proposed to account for consistent patterns of behavior.  We call on researchers to conduct tests of normative theories that test the processes these theories assert. 

Recession Jitters Among Professional Class Families: Perceptions of Economic Strain and Family Adjustments
Presented by: Anisa M. Zvonkovic, KyungHee Lee, Erika D. Brooks, NaYeon Lee

Distinct concepts such as hostility and support are often highly collinear in their measurement, especially when obtained from self-administered questionnaires. We use confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) to estimate multi-trait, multi-method (MTMM) models of self- and partner-reports of husbands' and wives' hostility and support in a sample of 460 recently married or cohabiting couples. Results suggest that measures of hostility are inversely correlated but distinct from measures of support. In regression, both hostility and support separately explained significant variance in observed relationship quality. Furthermore, spouse-reports of respondent's hostility and support contribute distinctively to the explanation of observed relationship quality beyond that explained by the respondent. In contrast, respondents were not able to distinguish their own hostility (or support) from that of their partners. Implications for research design and analysis are discussed.