Investment

• • Practical Applications → Understand why people stay or return to abusive relationships – high investment and low quality of alternatives. Helped to drive Woman’s aid initiatives which help people to leave abusive relationships by providing them with support such as housing, so they have a higher quality of alternatives e.g. being alone, so a lower commitment level to their abusive relationship – economy.
• • Support → Le + Agnew did a meta-analysis of 52 studies from 5 countries with 11,500 participants. They found that satisfaction level, comparison level for alternative and investment size all predicted relationship commitment. When commitment was high, it correlated positively with relationship stability. / Secondary data + correlational.
• • Validity → Difficult to measure variables such as commitment, satisfaction, investment and comparison level of alternatives as they are subjective and vary from person to person. Goodfriend + Agnew said that future investments need to be considered as when as the current resources put into the relationship e.g. marriage, honeymoon, kids, holidays, IVF – reductionist.