Meg Barker introduces the Enduring Love? project and invites those in long-term relationships to fill in the questionnaire.

There has been plenty of research on break-up, divorce and separation. The team behind Enduring Love? project decided that it was time that we knew more about what makes people stay together.

 The plan is to get as many people as possible to fill out the online questionnaire so that the researchers can get a good idea of the diversity of ways in which people are experiencing long-term relationships, as well as anything that people who stay together have in common. 

At the same time, there will be more in-depth research on 60 couples who will keep a diary of their relationship, take part in interviews together and separately, and explore the way they live and how they feel in their relationship. The detailed research will consider various aspects of the couple relationship such as emotions, sex, commitment, and the way that their partnership fits with other important relationships in their lives. 

You can get an idea of the kinds of things people are saying about their relationships from the video clips and podcasts that the team has put together. 

The project is called Enduring Love? with a question mark to give the title a double meaning. The researchers are keen to explore what makes relationships work for those who stay together long term and who find that a fulfilling way to live. At the same time it is clear that some couples feel pressured to stay together even when they are very unhappy. It is useful to know what makes an enduring love, as well as what the experience is like when love itself becomes something to be endured. 

Of course many relationships include elements of both these things: when times are hard the relationship feels like something to be endured, and when things are going well the 'enduring' nature of the relationship is something that may be celebrated. Enduring hard times can build intimacy as well as sometimes breaking it. 

At the launch event on 16 January we heard from a Department of Education representative, who spoke about ways in which the research could feed into government strategies around relationships. For example, it could help to illuminate the diversity of relationship styles that people are currently engaged in, feeding into relationship education in school PSHE, developing relationship therapy training, and informing programmes which help couples to transition to different forms of relationships (for example, those who continue to co-parent or live together when they are no longer a couple). 

And author and journalist Kate Figes spoke about her book Couples: The Truth which is based on interviews with a range of couples. She found that people don't tend to reflect on their relationships whilst things are going well – only when things go badly wrong. People also feel that it is disloyal to talk about what goes on in their relationship to anybody outside of it. Finally, people are very concerned about whether their relationship is  'normal'. 

Kate's ideas resonated with my own thoughts on this topic as she highlighted key pressures that relationships are currently under, many of which I also explore in my book Rewriting the Rules, which is out later this year. 

She says that there is romantic pressure to find a soulmate who will provide us with our happily-ever-after; there is sexual pressure to have perfect exciting sex throughout a relationship; and there is pressure to be monogamous, with any kind of infidelity regarded as unacceptable. However, the first two pressures make it more, rather than less, likely that people will end up looking elsewhere because nobody can be everything to us, people change over time, and such insularity can leave us gasping for freedom.  

Kate reckoned that important ways forward were for people to be more honest about the lows and highs of their relationships, to communicate better with each other, and to recognise the impact of our backgrounds, cultures, and family histories on how we understand relationships (which will inevitably be different to that of our partners). She also argued that the adversarial legal system is very bad for people who are trying to shift their relationship into a different form (co-parenting for example) and that mediation is a better alternative.  

At the launch we also heard from academics Lynn Jamieson and Ann Phoenix, who talked about their own research in this area and what their hopes were for the Enduring Love? project. 

Lynn looked at how our understandings of coupledom have changed over time. She said an older participant in her research spoke about the way marriage used to be just what people did at a certain age, whilst many now see love as a vital ingredient.  

Lynn, and others in the audience, raised questions about who we count as a couple. For example, many couples now don't live together some, or even all, of the time. There are also people who are in secret couples which others in their lives do not know about. And polyamorous people have relationships with more than one person so they may be in more than one couple, or in a triad/quad or family rather than a couple at all. 

In Rewriting the Rules I question the dividing rules that we have between romantic love and other kinds of relationship which are not always clear-cut (what about a romantic relationship that has become more like a friendship over time, or a close friendship between people who live together and have intense rows and good times together?)

Lynn suggested that the Enduring Love? research could provide valuable insights into 'practices of intimacy': what are the building blocks of relationships that we may not be aware of but which we use everyday to connect with those we're close to? What is the role of talking (and deciding not to talk) about certain issues? Other such practices include caring for each other, learning about each other, spending time together (physically present and digitally mediated), prioritising, and giving and receiving. 

Lynn agreed with Kate about the ludicrous pressures of cultural ideas such as 'The One' and 'Mr/Ms Right', suggesting that we might move towards celebrating more pragmatic arrangements that people have in their relationships. 

Ann Phoenix went on to explore such ideas further in her talk which highlighted the roles of myths and stories that couples have about their relationships (which draw upon cultural myths as well as family backgrounds). Like Kate she highlighted the importance of recognising that all relationships have dissatisfactions and disharmonies as well as shared stories, even if these are more rarely spoken about with others. 

Ann suggested that key areas to consider, when exploring relationships, include the diversity of experiences of those in transnational couples (who may be forced to live apart and/or have different backgrounds and privileges, for example), and same-sex couples. Like polyamorous people, such couples have the additional pressure of frequently having to explain their relationships to strangers, which is a very different experience to those whose relationship is take-for-granted and even celebrated by others and by wider culture. 

Ann also discussed change, which is something that I focus on in Rewriting the Rules. She said that over time we are not the same people who we were back when we got together, never mind being the same couple. She also questioned the binary way in which we tend to see 'enduring' and 'breaking up'. As I explore in my chapter on break-up, given the shifts that relationships go through over time we might begin to challenge what it means to 'stay together' and to 'split up' and what there might be between these two extremes. Perhaps 'enduring love' is a love that is flexible enough to shift and change over time as the situation demands it. 

Hopefully the sociological approach taken by the Enduring Love? researchers will enable a continued exploration of the psychosocial nature of relationships. 

Our intimate relationships happen in a wider context of global, economic, political, and social change as well as within wider social networks which may support or constrain our relationships. We know, for example, that social policies influence whether people can live together or not, and economic situations and policies determine who can get married. Clearly cultural ideals about relationships impact on our expectations and experiences. 

Relationships are not something we learn how to do once and for all, rather they are a work in progress, operating within a world which is also changing all the time.  

Find out more

To take part in the Enduring Love? study go here.

To find out more about the project go here.

For more on my Rewriting the Rules project go here. There will be regular updates until the book is published later in the year.

Meg Barker is a senior lecturer in psychology at the Open University and has recently written a book on relationships called Rewriting the Rules, which will be out in Summer 2012 published by Routledge.

Cartoon by Catherine Pain

An indigenous people are taking on the government over access to land and water. Open University researcher Alessandra Marino reports from Madhya Pradesh, India.

With children gathering under the trees for their morning classes, a handful of men cooking food on the fire and other villagers farming in the fields behind the green tent in which I write, it is easy to forget that I am in the heart of a struggle. But I am.

Under this tent, for more than three weeks, over 130 people have carried out the longest occupation of government-owned land ever registered in Madhya Pradesh (a state in central India). The occupiers are ‘oustees’, displaced from their land by the Sardar Sarovar and the Jobat dam projects. Mostly adivasis (indigenous people) associated with the NBA (Narmada Bachao Andolan) movement, they have never been compensated for the loss of their land. The demonstrators are demanding fair land-based rehabilitation for themselves, their families and all the oustees.

In the district of Alirajpur and Badwani, the overwhelming majority of the victims of displacement are adivasis. People belonging to different villages, from the hilly village of Bhadal and Jalsindhi to the villages in the plains around Jobat, have united in this satyagraha (non-violent action).

How long will the protest last? The villagers claim they will hold on to this site until the state materially compensates them. A starting point would be the granting of rights to the land that they now occupy. Divided into lots it could accommodate between 15 and 17 families. The demonstrators will keep on sleeping under the tent, cooking on site and farming in the fields; if jailed, they are likely to go back to site.

 In 2007, the NBA organized a similar occupation in Badwani, but on the 12th day of the protest, the villagers were assaulted and lathi-charged while they were having dinner and then conducted to jail. After the opening of a court case on this episode, the state was compelled to pay to 92 oustees compensation of 10,000 rupees, 5,000 of which have been already disbursed under the Supreme Court’s directions.

Perhaps fearful of a repeat episode, the government has not undertaken any forcible vacation of the protest site, nor has it used violence against the people. Apart from the collector of the Alirajpur district, who has so far been sympathetic to the protesters’ requests, the authorities have not shown any interest.

There has been a less visible response: after the first week, water and electricity supplies were cut, leaving the site in darkness and endangering the cultivation of crops. In spite of this, life goes on. Disruption to farming has been kept to a minimum through the use of new technologies that require less water. Today all the villagers, 40 of which are children, eat, bathe and cultivate the land using a single, private water-pump. With the cold winter nights and the lack of electricity, the living conditions are not easy, but over 15 years of displacement and survival on hilltops are motivation enough to keep on struggling.

There is another precedent that fuels hope too. In Maharashtra, a similar occupation took place in 2003 for less than 20 days in a place called Somaval. After that, three resettlement sites were set up in Javdavadi, Vadchil and Chikli. The official process of allocation of the land to the oustees continues to this day. The oustees in Madhya Pradesh ask with reason why they cannot benefit from the same process.

For the protesters, this tent is far from being an illegal encroachment. It represents a legal right to peaceful protest, which they exercise as Indian citizens against the long-lasting silence of the authorities on the issue of rehabilitation and the corruption of this process; and against the abstract justice of court judgments that were never implemented.

Listening to the people’s demands, many questions arise over the relation between the state and the rights of citizenship, and the concepts of justice and legality. Given the continuing dispossession of adivasi people from their right to land, they live in a permanent state of exception; why should we, then, use legality as a key for interpreting the protest? Who or what is illegal here is hard to decide.

Alessandra Marino 9 January 2012

Alessandra Marino is research associate working for the Open University's Oecumene project. 

Cartoon by Catherine Pain

Oecumene is exploring citizenship after Orientalism: how the concept of citizenship is being refigured and renewed around the globe. This blog first appeared on the Oecumene blog site. There is a helpful analysis of the adivasis' plight here.

• To read the full article, hop over to OpenLearn.

Dr Roby works on the Disruption Project which involves seven universities including the Open University and is funded by the RCUK Energy Programme. The project looks at how travel practices are formed and directed by underlying societal factors. We argue that people’s travel behaviour is less fixed and routine than it is often considered to be. The project looks at the way people’s lives are frequently disrupted by a whole range of possible events, from family illnesses to volcanic ash clouds or snow. The insights that these disruptions provide can help reveal the kinds of changes, to transport and other policy sectors such as health, education and business that are needed to inspire and facilitate a shift to lower carbon travel.

Picture credit: Jon Curnow via Flickr under Creative Commons Licence


 

American news networks really do employ a political commentator called Krystal Ball – but there are good reasons why economists can’t foresee the future. So why do governments and businesses still frame key decisions around their predictions? Alan Shipman provides some answers. 

To the main objection – that Eurozone members would lose the power to correct a cost disadvantage by devaluing their national currency, and so would have to ‘adjust’ through much more painful wage and price reduction – the Euro architects had three answers.  

First, there would be economic ‘convergence’, causing members’ costs and productivities to move closer together. Second, currency devaluation no longer worked, since it caused inflation that would soon leave ‘real’ costs as high as they were before. Third, as the monetary union deepened, external imbalances between member states would no longer be a policy concern. The persistent trade deficits run by some American states and Canadian provinces (or between Wales and England, or Italy’s Mezzogiorno with Lombardy) have ceased to matter since they adopted the same currency, because of automatic balancing flows through national businesses and budgets.  

'forecasters aren’t measurably better than a random prediction'

Some advocates of EU economic and monetary union even called for the early admission of peripheral countries like Greece and Portugal, without waiting for them to meet all the ‘convergence criteria’ laid down by the European Commission. Their prediction was that convergence would accelerate once countries joined the union, so it made sense to let them in to speed up their move towards German standards of budgeting and inflation, on which sustainable membership ultimately depended. 

It doesn’t augur well… 

Chances of complete accuracy 'infinitesimally small'
Before any cross-Channel laughter at the gap between these predictions and today’s grim reality, it’s worth reflecting on the success of economic forecasts closer to home. As recently as March, the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) was forecasting that the UK economy would grow 1.7% in 2011, and 2.5% in 2012. Its revised forecast, issued in November, knocks these numbers down to 0.9% in 2011 and 0.7% in 2012. Because slower growth means a wider budget deficit and higher public debt, it’s a drop that severely affects Treasury plans, forcing the Chancellor to switch from Plan A to Plan A*, Plan A+ and beyond. 

The OBR prepared the ground for this lapse in foresight in its first Forecast Evaluation Report, published in October – when, ironically, it was having to explain why it under-estimated growth and was thus too gloomy about public debt in 2010/11. The Report admits that “the chances of any economic or fiscal forecast being accurate in every dimension are infinitesimally small".

Like any good forecaster, it tries to dissuade users from paying too much attention to the central numbers, reminding them of the margin of error it places around those percentage changes, its demonstrations of how sensitive these are to movements in variables it can’t forecast (like interest on the government’s debt) and unforeseeable shocks (like Eurozone meltdown), and its commentary about downside risks. 

OBR members were recruited because of their distinguished records in economic forecasting. But these were mostly compiled during the long, unusually steady upturn at the start of the century, now known as the ‘great moderation’; none had foreseen the economic step-change in 2007-8. Between its crisis points, an economy’s growth and inflation can be quite reliably forecast by just taking last year’s data as the best guide to next year’s, without using any elaborate models. When crisis strikes, it’s often when the ‘fan charts’ are at their narrowest, so even the forecasters’ worst-case scenario doesn’t capture the cliff-edge ahead.  

Wrong for all the right reasons
 While seldom getting it right, economists have many good reasons for getting it wrong. In the OBR’s case, there have been revisions to the data that feed into their forecast: the Office of National Statistics now identifies a deeper fall in productive capacity in 2008-9, meaning there is less of an ‘output gap’ to generate growth in the forecast period. There have been unforeseeable adverse events in the Eurozone, which changes the scenario for UK exports and financing costs. And, of course, a team that was still unwrapping its computers in temporary Treasury rooms in 2010 has now had a year in which to build and refine its forecasting models. 

On top of this, government and business strategy are affected by announcements from the OBR and other influential analysts, causing modification to the processes they’re trying to predict. In the middle of an upswing or downswing, forecasts may be partially self-fulfilling – reinforcing a belief that things are getting better or worse, so that people change their behaviour to make it so. But when a forecast is especially upbeat or doom-laden, it can spark behaviour-change that undermines it. Businesses get wary of euphoria, reining-in their investment if they’re told it’s about to boom. Governments panic at the prospect of recession, and rush to stimulate growth if the forecast says they’ve stalled it.  

Understandable scepticism over the OBR’s macro-economic forecasts contrasts with predictions of the effects of tax and benefit changes, regularly put forward by the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), from which its main members were recruited. The IFS verdict on who will be better and who worse off after each Budget, and how it will affect the government’s deficit target, is generally accepted by the media and only challenged by ministers whose sums it questions. But the IFS has an easier task, because it only forecasts the effect of a policy change on its tax-and-expenditure model, with all other policies and external variables held constant. The OBR has to forecast the effects of policy change on the actual economy, with all the extraneous events, other policy changes and feedback loops in full flow as it does so.  

Forecasters 'experts at explaining away incorrect predictions'
If economists are ever unsettled by their paucity of foresight, they can take comfort from the track-record of other social sciences. A century on, tribute is still paid to Norman Angell, the political scientist who – in 1910 – published an analysis that appeared to show there could never be another large European war. (In 1921 he published a follow-up, explaining that the Great War’s destructiveness proved his thesis).  Sociologists, meanwhile, have repeatedly predicted,among other things, the rise of a ‘leisure society’ with minimal work-hours, the inevitable rise of comprehensive insurance-based welfare states, and the abandonment of marriage as an institution. And in case technological forecasters are getting complacent, where are our ultrasonic dishwashers and queue-less supermarket checkouts? 

So why do we keep listening to forecasts, and why do governments and businesses still frame key decisions around them? The forecasters would say it’s because theirs is still the best guide to the future, and that what happens next will usually be captured somewhere in the fringes of their fan chart. But psychologists have another explanation, uncomfortably confirmed (well before the financial crisis) by Berkeley’s Philip Tetlock. Tetlock’s long-term studies show that forecasters – whether predicting economic growth, electoral contests or next Saturday’s football results – aren’t measurably better than the average (or a random) prediction. But they’re experts at getting their correct predictions noted, and suppressing the incorrect ones or explaining them away.  

Economists, often frustrated at not being viewed as natural scientists, should be thankful they are not judged by the same exacting standards. In September six Italian seismologists went on trial for playing down the risks of an earthquake, which then struck with a severity that caused over 300 deaths. Many more lives are likely to be blighted by the slowdown that the economic forecasters missed. They won’t be swelling the prison population, any more than they’ll be accurately predicting what it’ll rise to in 2013. 

Alan Shipman 13 December 2011

Alan Shipman is a lecturer in Economics at the Open University. He is responsible for the modules You and your money:personal finance in context and Personal investment in an uncertain world, part of the Open University's foundation degree in Financial Services. 

Cartoon by Gary Edwards

The good news is that more than ten years of open2.net content has been moved to a new website at open.edu/openlearn, creating one home for all the Open University's free online learning for the public. 

The new site continues to support OU-BBC broadcasts, but also gives access to iTunes U podcasts, YouTube videos, free study units taken from OU modules and topical content, arranged under subject areas relating to the OU curriculum. 

There's lots to do - you can watch Evan Davis exploring the state of British manufacturing; explore the frozen planet; get to know the science and history of the Olympics or have a look at our study units in LearningSpace.

Any existing links that direct people to open2.net content will automatically send people to the relevant pages on the new site.

You’ll find more information at open.edu/openlearn. 

For all its faults, the Eurozone as a whole is growing as fast as the UK, saving more, and running a lower fiscal deficit. If it’s being written off as a viable entity, we should all be very afraid, says Alan Shipman. 

But none of the 17 members (except Germany) has an incentive to drop out – since even if they get half their euro-denominated debt written off (as did Greece), the inevitable devaluation of their new national currency would multiply the cost of the remaining euro debt. They’ll find borrowing in euro increasingly expensive, but borrowing after leaving the euro would be even more so. 

However, the Eurozone is a different kind of single currency area now that only a minority of its members have a top (AAA) credit rating. There are three rating agencies, but they tend to reach similar verdicts, and those of one (Standard & Poor’s) at the start of November can be seen below: 

Eurozone credit rating by country (outlook November 2011)

 Outlook:  = Stable + Positive - Negative 

These ratings suggest that only one member (Greece) is expected to default on its debts – indeed, it has already done so in all but name, the name being avoided so as not to trigger credit default swaps on the sovereign debt, which would spark a flurry of protests and legal actions from the US where many of these default-insurance contracts were written. Portugal is strongly expected to default, but may still be small enough to get a Greek-style bailout that prevents this.  

A helping hand for Europe’s banks…
All the other members below AAA are still expected to honour their debts. But by being less than top-rate, they must pay a significantly higher interest rate than Germany and the other AAA countries. Although not intentional, this may provide a rescue mechanism for Eurozone banks, still struggling to regain profitability and balance sheet strength after the asset-price falls of 2007-9. By holding the debt of zone members rated BBB+  to AA+, they can get an extra return (compared to German debt) without incurring significantly more risk. These high-yielding bonds are still investment-grade, and still given the lowest risk weighting when international regulators set banks’ minimum capital requirements. 

However, most of these countries are too small to issue significant amounts of sovereign debt. (Estonia’s government hasn’t been a net borrower at all until this year, its debt problem being in the private sector). Italy and Spain are the two big sources of ‘high-yield’ Eurozone government debt. That’s why any debt repayment problems on their part would be a disaster for the whole European banking system, not just the governments and citizens of those two countries.  

… that may be halted by the dangers of high interest … 
The Eurozone could tackle the danger of Italian or Spanish default by forcing the European Central Bank (ECB) to buy their debt, becoming their lender-of-last-resort. It doesn’t want to do so, because this would put the ECB’s own AAA credit rating a risk. Eurozone credit ratings might then sink to their current average, rather than be pulled back up to the top. 

Its alternative plan is to let the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF) lend to Italy and Spain when the private markets refuse to do so (at affordable cost) – and then invite governments and other investors outside the Eurozone to lend to the EFSF. That might be a way to get China, Japan, the oil-rich Middle East and other high-saving nations with capital surpluses to finance marginal Eurozone members’ heavy borrowing requirements.  

But it’s not certain: these creditor nations may prefer to go on lending to the US, which has the advantage of printing the world’s reserve currency. The US has been able to continue borrowing at near-zero interest rates, even though S&P bizarrely reduced its sovereign rating to AA+ in August. 

… and by disinterested outsiders
Eurozone plans are also frustrated by the decision of three AAA-rated EU countries – the UK, Sweden and Denmark – to stay outside the euro area. Of these, only the UK issues significant amounts of debt. But for Eurozone investors, it’s another opportunity to get higher returns without higher risk, if they believe that the UK pound sterling is going to appreciate against the euro. That can be a self-fulfilling expectation, if enough investors sell euro to buy sterling debt. The capital inflow from the Eurozone has helped the UK reduce its sovereign borrowing costs to record low levels in 2011. 

The Eurozone’s problems began because it admitted members who couldn’t match German standards of monetary and fiscal discipline, and who lost the incentive to do so once they adopted the single currency; and because it lacks the mechanisms to re-allocate funding from members with surpluses to those with deficits, via either its budgets or its central bank.

But these problems have now become intertwined with those of the European banking system, still recovering from the shocks of 2008. If Italy or Spain lurch further towards default, and don’t get ECB or ESFS support to stop their borrowing costs rising, then the banks’ gamble on buying their debt will backfire. The capital they are required to hold against that debt will rise, forcing them into another self-destructive scramble to raise new capital (pushing up its costs) and sell assets (pushing down their value).  

But the UK can’t afford to watch complacently from the sidelines. Its own banks’ holdings of Eurozone sovereign debt will run them into similar trouble if the borrowers need a bailout or if sterling appreciates. And its stalling growth rate, which would be exacerbated if stronger sterling restrained its exports, means its own AAA rating is not indefinitely secure. 

Sovereign ratings can stay at AAA if the government can keep raising enough tax revenue to service its debt, without undermining the national-income growth from which the debt will eventually be repaid. For all its faults, the Eurozone as a whole is growing as fast as the UK, saving more, and running a lower fiscal deficit. If it’s being written off as a viable entity, we should all be very afraid. 

Alan Shipman 22 November 2012 

Alan Shipman is a lecturer in Economics at the Open University. He is responsible for the courses You and your money:personal finance in context  (DB123) and Personal investment in an uncertain world (DB234). 

Cartoon by Gary Edwards

Today (14 November 2011) is Student Finance Day. With student fees and loans high on the agenda for those considering university, Platform caught up with some prospective students via Twitter to find out how fees have influenced their decision making so far...

Name: Mrs Claire Siciliano
Age: 27
Location: Welwyn Garden City

Name: Alexandre L Costa
Age: 34
Location: Luton

Useful links

• Student Finance Day 
• Open University Fees 2012