Reasons for Withholding Relational Complaints

For this project, we aim to identify and validate the reasons individuals cite for withholding complaints from their romantic partners. In other words, this project explores the reasons people avoid expressing their complaints to their romantic partner. In sum, this overarching project seeks to: (a) develop a typology of people’s reasons for withholding their complaints and (b) advance a standardized measure capable of quantitatively assessing the extent to which certain reasons contribute more strongly to people’s decision to express or withhold their complaint. In a previous study, we developed a typology of reasons for withholding complaints based on 850 open-ended responses from married people currently withholding a complaint from their spouse. Based on the responses, we devised 56 items to reflect each of the eight reasons people reported for withholding their complaints: (a) other protection, (b) conflict avoidance, (c) trivial, (d) fruitless, (e) self-protection, (f) relationship protection, (g) efficacy, and (h) wishful thinking. Therefore, in this study, we aim to establish a quantitative measure that allows researchers to evaluate people's reasons for withholding their complaints. This study is concerned only with establishing a quantitative scale; therefore, we expect to identify 8 unique reasons within the scale. After completing this project, we intend to evaluate the internal and external validity of the measure. However, this study is only focused on establishing the measure.