City Research Online

Abstract

Long‐established studies and scales have advanced understandings of family function, marital satisfaction, and couple relationship quality. The underpinning constructs nevertheless remain under‐conceptualized and largely removed from the heuristic of everyday life and the dynamic of contemporary coupledom. We propose that a paradigm shift is required to sufficiently engage with the digital worlds of 21st century intimacies. Ideas in feminist new materialism revitalize the epistemology and ontology of relationship science. This enables a new look at how relationship quality is manifest in and created through human–technology intra–actions. The research tools of feminist new materialism are, however, typically creative and intentionally exploratory. We demonstrate how using a practices approach, which focuses on everyday lived experience, facilitates investigation of multidimensional public–private worlds. We deploy this to build a feminist new materialist analysis of a digital couple intervention. Through this, we develop the concept of more–than–relationship quality.

Publication Type:	Article
Additional Information:	© 2023 The Authors. Journal of Family Theory & Review published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of National Council for Family Relations. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Publisher Keywords:	couple relationships, diffractive analysis, digital couple interventions, family practices, feminist new materialism, more–than–relationship quality
Subjects:	B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion > BF Psychology H Social Sciences > H Social Sciences (General) H Social Sciences > HQ The family. Marriage. Woman
Departments:	School of Health & Psychological Sciences School of Health & Psychological Sciences > Nursing
SWORD Depositor:	Symplectic Administrator

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