Measures of Healthy Relationships for Youth and Emerging Adults: Reviewing Existing Practices and Moving the Field Forward

Background and Purpose: While healthy relationships (HR) education has been widely adopted as a way to educate youth about positive intimate relationships and to prevent violence in relationships, scholars and practitioners have not yet established a cohesive definition or model of HR, leading to inconsistencies in HR measurement both in practice and throughout the literature. This research utilizes scoping review methodology to identify the measures used to evaluate HR and related HR attitudes, knowledge, or behaviors.

Methods: Documents were identified through six database searches, a general Google search, a search of VAWnet, manual searches of relevant journals, and manual searches of the reference lists of key articles. A title/abstract screen and full text screen were conducted to identify documents that were scholarly publications, published between 2005 and 2021, written in English, included a focus on teens or young adults, included a focus on healthy intimate relationships, and included a definition, components, or measure of HR. In total, 964 non-duplicated documents were identified and, after screening and data extraction, 69 articles met the inclusion criteria. Of these documents, 29 included at least one quantitative measure of HR or its components, predictors, or outcomes.

Results: In total, 47 unique measures were used to measure HR. Few measures were repeated across documents (only 10 measures were repeated across two or three documents each). In addition, a large number of measures were created by the publication’s authors for the included publication (n=16), often to measure program outcomes. Most of the measures focused on components, predictors, outcomes, or proxies for HR instead of measuring HR itself. In fact, the 47 measures evaluated 23 different concepts. Only three of the identified measures evaluated HR directly, with an additional two measures evaluating changes in HR knowledge (Cronbach’s alphas ranging from .69 to .93). The most common concepts measured were beliefs about what relationships should look like (n=5), relationship/marital satisfaction (n=4), relationship knowledge (n=4), and conflict resolution (n=4).

Conclusions and Implications: While literature is being published on HR and programs are being developed to encourage HR, HR is largely being measured indirectly and unsystematically; factors related to HR (such as its components) are being used as proxies for measuring HR itself. This inconsistency demonstrates that HR lacks a unified definition or framework, and that the reality of HR may be fluid and changing, creating difficulties with its measurement. However, the lack of consistency in HR measurement impacts how research findings can be compared and how HR programs can be evaluated. Further implications for research and practice will be discussed, including recommendations for developing a measure of HR.