Application: How a gender-as-relational perspective has been applied in quantitative studies of emotion work in romantic relationships

In this chapter, we focus on how a gender-as-relational perspective (Fox & Murry, 2000) has been applied in quantitative studies of romantic relationships. Though feminist researchers have discussed the increasing diversity of methods in feminist research (Rutherford, 2011), there are relatively fewer examples of quantitative studies that have explicitly used a gender-as-relational perspective (e.g., Curran et al., 2015; Umberson & Kroeger, 2016). First, we describe the gender-as-relational perspective as it relates to feminist theory and romantic relationships. Second, we describe emotion work as it operates in romantic relationships, how it differs between women and men, and why it is an appropriate construct to study from a gender-as-relational perspective. Third, we describe how dyadic data analysis, specifically actor-partner interdependence models (APIM; Kenny et al., 2016), can be used to study romantic relationship dynamics from a gender-as-relational perspective. Finally, we describe three studies that have applied a gender-as-relational perspective to examining emotion work in romantic relationships, noting their contributions to feminist theory.