008-01: Rethinking Marital Commitment: Theorizing About Change and Stability in Divorce Ideation Over Time

Scholarship on commitment uncertainty, marital ambivalence, and divorce ideation suggests the importance of better understanding the dialectical tensions involved in navigating the liminal space of marital commitment uncertainty. In order to model complex relational processes of change over time, however, researchers need to move beyond contextualized snapshots of relationship processes to a more continuous mapping of changes in emotions, beliefs, and behaviors. This longitudinal qualitative research explores divorce ideation over time to explore theoretical models that may better capture the dynamic processes of stability and change embedded within how married partners make decisions about the future of their marriage. In doing so, we suggest a different way of thinking about the meaning of marital commitment.

008-02: Child Custody in the Context of Parental Dissolution: A Process-Relational Approach

In the United States, the forms and trajectories of parental relationships are diverse. Births commonly occur to both married and unmarried mothers, and parental relationships often end before their children reach the age of majority. Consequently, child custody is a prevalent issue for many families. Despite the profound impacts of child custody decision-making, understanding of this process remains limited. Little attention has focused on the holistic, dynamic processes involved in child custody disputes. Thus, we propose a theoretical framework of child custody decision-making that identifies the multi-level, dynamic processes that occur throughout contexts and accounts for intraindividual and intrafamilial change.