Discuss the extent to which relationships have been shown to differ in cultures (24 marks)

However, Takano’s study only focusses on 2 cultures so generalising to others is difficult and lacks ecological validity. Another explanation for low divorce rates is due to perception of separation. In japan it is seen as shameful for the whole families compared to the west, where it’s between the individuals and there’s less negativity. This shows cultural differences in divorce.

A further difference that exists in a relationship is the emphasis on love and romance. Ho argues that the West place more emphasis on love and romance whilst collectivist focus on the importance of responsibility and family needs, suggesting a cultural bias in relationships.

Gupta et al suggests that there is a cultural difference between liking and love. Their findings imply that western relationships scored highly at the beginning for love but then decrease over time. Compared the east where love scored low by grew in arranged marriages. This shows that west relationships are not superior and they may be more blinded by low.

However, Xioahe and Whyte that found women in china were happier in marriages that they chose rather than those in traditional marriages. Showing a negative factor to traditional arranged marriages.

Nevertheless, research by Umadevi show that people in arranged marriages can be happy also. They compared female Indian students from professional and nonprofessional backgrounds. Both groups were happy with the idea of having an arranged marriage if they gave consent.

Despite this, Myers found no differences in marital satisfaction between Indian arranged couple and US non-arranged. This suggests the degree of voluntarism does not affect the degree of happiness and therefore the validity of the voluntarism hypothesis is questionable.

Although research suggests that arranged marriages are superior, the data uses marriage as an indicator of success. For instance, it is less socially acceptable to divorce in India, as their will be more pressure to maintain a poor relationship in order to avoid separation. Therefore this demonstrates that a direct comparisons between cultures may be difficult as methods of assessing relationships are subject to different influences within different cultures, which reduces the validity of results and the conclusions that are drawn.

It also should be noted that there are differences within cultures. For instance, Paris is in the same culture as London but there are still many relationship differences between each place which means research suffers from imposed etic.

Also most of the research is done with questionnaires and therefore the risk of providing data that is objective and reliable is difficult. Participants are likely to respond with socially desirable answers to keep in with their cultural norms, which threatens the internal validity.

There is also historical bias because a lot of the research was done early 1990s. Now there is urbanisations of many non-western countries which might change the way relationships are made.

In conclusion, Pinker suggested that romantic relationships are a form of evolutionary process involved to promote survival and reproduction amongst human beings. He believed that this is a universal process and thus opposes the idea of there being a difference between cultures.