Goal conflict
Creators: name: Vowels, Laura
Publisher: name: Open Science Framework
Year: 2022
Subjects: subject: Social Psychology
subject: Social and Behavioral Sciences
subject: Psychology
subject: FOS: Psychology

description: The Current Research A few studies to date have addressed goal conflict in relation to individual and relational well-being showing that goal conflict has a negative impact on well-being (Gere &amp; Impett, 2018; Gere &amp; Schimmack, 2013; Gere et al., 2011; Righetti et al., 2016). However, surprisingly little research has been dedicated to addressing how goal conflict influences support toward goal pursuit and engagement in life’s opportunities (see Gere &amp; Impett, 2018 and Hui et al., 2014 for exceptions). The purpose of the current research is to address this gap in the literature. Specifically, the aim of the research is to examine whether goal conflict influences the interpersonal processes of RC support: support seeking, support providing, perceived partner responsiveness, and commitment toward opportunities. We expect that goal conflict will be negatively associated with all four core processes as partners are motivated to avoid threats to the relationship. Specifically, we expect that target’s perception of goal conflict will be negatively associated with support seeking (H1; replication of research by Righetti, Kumashiro, and Campbell, 2014 using the same dataset by), perceived partner responsiveness (H2; novel), and goal commitment/motivation (H3; novel). We also expect that partner’s perception of goal conflict will be negatively associated with support providing (H4). Previous research has shown that goal conflict is associated with motivation to provide, or not provide, support (Feeney et al., 2013, 2017) but has not been tested for actual support. We do not make any a priori predictions for partner effects as there is not enough prior research to be confident about specific hypotheses. However, if anything, the associations are likely to also be negative. Furthermore, we also extend the current literature by addressing whether individual differences in attachment styles moderate the relationship between goal conflict and the support processes. We expect that when goal conflict is high, higher levels of attachment anxiety will negatively predict perception of support (H5) as well as motivation toward goal pursuit (H6). We expect that when goal conflict is high, individuals higher (vs. lower) in attachment avoidance will seek less support (H7). Furthermore, while individuals lower (vs. higher) in attachment avoidance will be less motivated to pursue goals, those higher in attachment avoidance will be unaffected and therefore we expect this association to be positive (H8). We also expect that when partners high (vs. low) in attachment anxiety perceive goals as conflicting, they will provide less support (H9). We expect all other moderator effects to be non-significant but include them in the model as controls. Please see Table 1 for the hypotheses and Figure 2 for a graphical illustration of the proposed predictions. We aim to test the hypotheses in a sample of couples who completed 8-days of daily diary data. We will use multilevel modeling with two-levels of random variation in which partners are nested within dyads and days are crossed within partners (Kenny, Kashy, &amp; Cook, 2006). We will include both partners’ perceptions of goal conflict and both partners’ attachment styles (and moderation) predicting a) support seeking, b) support providing, c) perceived responsiveness, and d) goal pursuit/movement. Furthermore, because goals can conflict with either the partner’s goals or the relationship’s goals, we will also test the models separately for goal conflict with partner’s goals and goal conflict with relationship’s goals to see whether models vary for the two outcome variables. We will also test for lagged effects by including yesterday’s goal conflict to predict the next day’s outcomes.