FAQs

Partners must both be at least 18 years old. Partners must be engaged or in the first 4 months of marriage. Partners must be fluent in English (to ensure comprehension of the survey questionnaires). Partners involved in any kind of marriage or engagement—straight marriage, gay marriage, first marriage, second (third, fourth, and fifth) marriage, open marriage—all are welcome! Partners must be willing to remain active in the study for the full 2-year period.

All payments will be dispersed using TangoCard. This site compensates participants involved in research with gift cards. Participants are able to choose gift cards from a catalog of over 200 vendors across the United States. TangoCard has a 4.2/5 star rating with Trustpilot. For sessions that include an in-lab component (Sessions 1 and 4), you will receive compensation after the lab session has been completed. In other words, both spouses must complete the online questionnaires and lab session to receive payment. Research assistants will manually distribute payment following completion of the lab session. For the diary component of the study, you will be paid automatically by Tango for each diary assessment you complete. We will pay you $0.75 for each of the 11 shorter diaries you complete and $1.50 each for the 3 longer diaries on days 1, 7, and 14. Reimbursement will be based on individual completion of each diary assessment, and it is not required that both spouses complete a day's assessment to receive payment. If you complete all 14 assessments, you may each receive a $2.25 bonus (per spouse) at the end of the 14-day period. A research assistant will monitor dairy completion and manually distribute the bonus on Tango. For sessions that only include online questionnaires (Sessions 2, 3, 5, 6, & 7), both spouses must complete the questionnaires to receive payment. Research assistants will manually distribute payments on Tango after both members of the couple have submitted their surveys.

We will be sad to see you go, but we understand that plans change! You can withdraw from the study and revoke your data at any time without any consequences. You only need to contact the research team to inform us that you are withdrawing from the study. Couples are required to participate together, so if one partner chooses to withdraw, both members will be removed from the study.

All online sessions will take place using web-based data collection platforms called Qualtrics and Inquisit. For all online assessments, you will be emailed a personalized link to complete your assessments.

We ask that couples complete as many sessions as you are able to, and you will only be compensated for the sessions you do complete. However, if there are specific questions in the surveys or research activities that you do not want to complete, you are allowed to skip those questions or abstain from those activities.

You are still able to participate during the study even if you move out of the area. The online assessments can be completed from anywhere, and we can work with you to complete the in-lab sessions using video calling platforms like Zoom or GoogleMeet.