Relationship Grid Survey

Article submitted for publication, Jan 2025

Overview
written by Sarah Knapp and Cathy Hill

This study provides evidence of the reliability and utility of one of the major concepts in Relational Life Therapy. We have gathered data from thousands of individuals confirming the structure of a Grid Questionnaire. The results are even more robust than expected and will contribute to the fields of couple therapy, clinical diagnosis and outcome, and personality research.

The Relationship Grid is one of the crucial lenses through which RLT practitioners diagnose and treat couple problems. The goal of this research was to validate the Grid as a measure and prove its utility in clinical work. We have gathered and analyzed data from thousands of individuals to show that the Questionnaire designed to measure placement on the Grid is indeed a reliable instrument. Additionally we have paid 430 participants to engage in further research to test our hypotheses that the questionnaire is reliable over time and that it has construct validity (i.e. scores on various quadrants correlate with attachment anxiety and avoidance, as well as with self-esteem, and overall levels of distress correlate with depression and anxiety).

To further test the potential of the Grid as a useful measure for both diagnosis and treatment outcome we used sophisticated statistical techniques to measure its fit to a circumplex (a circular model that depicts the similarities among multiple variables), with exceptionally good results. The Relationship Grid fits the statistical properties of a circumplex and provides a more clinically meaningful representation of problems couples experience in relationships than do traditional representations of the circumplex. A number of researchers have used circumplex measures in outcome research, with varied results. We believe that the Grid provides a much more user-friendly instrument with more practical and theoretical relevance to outcome research. These results will be of interest to researchers in the fields of both clinical and personality research, as well as to clinical practitioners.

We paid 100 participants to complete our battery of questionnaires and to recruit their partners to do the same. This will allow us to analyze self- versus other-report, and to contribute to the literature on couple dynamics as well as gender differences.

Background

Within personality psychology there is a stream of theory and research that focuses on describing or assessing interpersonal behavior on two dimensions, often referred to as agency and communion. Timothy Leary (1957) was the first to place the dimensions on a circumplex, with the horizontal axis representing communion (also often called affiliation) and the vertical axis representing agency (sometimes referred to as power). Variations on the circumplex have appeared over the years, with the poles of agency generally called dominance/submission and the poles of communion referred to as hostility/friendliness, coldness/warmth, or hate/love.

Various questionnaires for assessing people on the circumplex have been devised, most with good internal and test-retest validity as well as external validity with self-report personality measures and clinical outcomes (Locke, 2006). All of the measures have been criticized as well for various shortcomings, including language that may be outmoded, lack of consistency for some quadrants (specifically the top right and bottom left) and overlap between extreme ends of the poles.

Independently of the extensive theorizing and research that has developed over the past five decades, Terry Real (2007) created something similar to the circumplex, which he calls the Relationship Grid. In his clinical experience Real found that people tend to fall into one of four quadrants in their behavior during relationship difficulties. The labels (and extreme behaviors) for these quadrants can be seen in the diagram below. Developed from clinical experience, rather than theoretical or philosophical underpinnings, the Relationship Grid may prove to have more clinical utility than the circumplex, particularly for couples therapists.

Take the Grid Survey here!

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