Complete 6 page APA formatted essay: Independent Groups Study.Download file to see previous pages... After all, the question of “What is love?” has stirred millennia of debate, how can researchers

Complete 6 page APA formatted essay: Independent Groups Study.

After all, the question of “What is love?” has stirred millennia of debate, how can researchers and scientists, or even philosophers, be expected to define such a vague and fleeting term? It was that question, as well as so many others, that Martin Buber sought to answer when he began work on his masterwork “I and Thou” (Buber, 1923). In this work, Buber defines man’s view of his own existence in terms of his reference to himself through the pronoun “I”. Buber argues that this pronoun can be divided into two categorical uses: I-It and I-Thou. People use the I-It (in place of the pronoun “I”) when referencing relationships which they feel are separate from themselves. For example, one might have an I-Thou relationship with a cashier in a grocery store. The cashier’s existence is of no significant importance to the customer, and the customer will probably forget the cashier by the time he or she gets to the car. Contrary to this relationship, Buber explains that the I-Thou relationship is not as easily forgotten. The I-Thou relationship is when both parties view each other as subjects, and not objects, and essentially appreciate the existence of the other. Buber argues that the essential, defining feature of this relationship is closeness, that each person loses their individual self to the communal identity. It is with this insight that Buber begins to find the solution to his original question. Love is the I-Thou relation, it is losing your sense of self and individuality to an identity based on a relationship with another. It is this definition of love as an intimate closeness that would influence Berscheid over fifty years later in his creation of the Relationship Closeness Inventory (RCI). The RCI is a self-reported questionnaire created by Berscheid and colleagues that attempts to measure the closeness of a relationship based on three factors: the amount of time the members of the relationship spend together, the variety of activities they engage in together, and the influence the members have on each other (Aron, 1992). While this measure proved valid and reliable (as well as accurate with an r=0.35), the measure did have its limitations. In his 1992 article “Inclusion of Other in the Self Scale and the Structure of Interpersonal Closeness”, Arthur Aron and colleagues describe the limitations of the RCI as being generally designed for and aimed at North American college students. Furthermore, Aron describes the RCI as taking 10-15 minutes to complete (Aron, 1992). Clearly, a more generalizable and shorter scale to measure the closeness that is so integral to love and strong interpersonal relationships is needed to further researchers’ understanding of this concept. It is this challenge that Aron and colleagues confront and overcome with their “Inclusion of Other in the Self Scale” (1992). The scale relies on its simplicity to overcome the challenges presented by the ROS, and uses increasingly overlapping venn diagrams labeled “self” and “other” to describe levels of closeness. Furthermore, Aron and colleagues (1992) showed the scale to be reliable and valid, as well as able to significantly predict whether a couple would still be together after three months.