Romantic Behaviors of University Students: A Cross-Cultural and Gender Analysis in Puerto Rico and the United States

This study examined cultural and gender differences in romantic behaviors among university students in Puerto Rico and the United States. The data were collected from a total of N = 395 students using a field-based, self-ranking fifteen-item scale. Descriptive statistics were used to obtain the means and standard deviations, and t-tests calculated to determine the differences between the groups. It was found that Puerto Rico respondents showed less discrepancy among their rankings of romantic behaviors, whereas the United States respondents exhibited more discrepancy among their rankings. Same gender cross-cultural data analyses indicated higher disagreement between the female than between the male rankings. The results provide support for the theoretical utility of the 15-item romantic scripts construct across cultures.  The ways in which human beings behave in romantic relationships or romantic love situations have been the focus of extensive research studies through the centuries. The contemporary popular culture literature continues to provide a rich source of different perspectives that have been used to understand the nature of romantic relationships as one of the most important areas of our human experience. The professional scientific literature also offers a broad range of approaches and modes of inquiry focusing on the themes of romantic relationships (Hendrick & Hendrick, 1989; Hendrick, Hendrick & Adler, 1988) and on romantic love's distinctive qualities as a source of passionate or compassionate behaviors between human beings (Hatfield & Rapson, 1987; Walster & Walster, 1978). Historically, the studies of romantic relationships have used diverse methods that can roughly be grouped into various research emphases. Some studies treat romantic love or romance as a fleeting feeling (Stearns & Knapp, 1993) and its emotional pitfalls among people are highlighted (Stemberg, 1987). Others have been studies about more formal relationships such as engaged couples (Rusbult, Onizuka, & Lipkus, 1993), ideal versus real romantic expectations (Lester, 1985), and hopes for a lasting relationship (Hong, Evans, & Hall, 1994; Sternberg & Barnes, 1988). A strong scholarly effort has emphasized the development of measures or instruments for assessing sub-components of romantic love (Forgas & Dobosz, 1980) or for self-reporting of personal romantic profiles (Bessell, 1984; Rubin, 1970). The focus on psycho-history, social scripts (Rechtein & Fiedler, 1988) and on cultural aspects for identifying the potential underlying social rules for romantic behaviors (Koenigsberg, 1967), have been other approaches to the study of romantic relationships. Yet another emphasis concerns the study of changing aspects of romantic behaviors (Hazan & Shaver, 1987), short term attachments and attraction (Feingold, 1990), and passion cycles in romantic relationships (Peele, 1988; Sprecher & Duck, 1994). A parallel research emphasis has been on the physiological and body chemistry of romantic love which attempts to isolate the physical and hormonal aspects involved in the romantic behaviors of people (Crenshaw, 1997; Walsh, 1996). While the number of studies focusing on these different emphases continue to grow, there has been until recently a scarcity of research attention to an important aspect of romantic love such as, individual romantic behaviors or acts of romantic courtship. The research efforts to develop a conceptual definition of romantic behaviors in courtship seem to be in their early stages (Tucker, 1992). Several studies have been undertaken by Tucker, Vivian, and Marvin (1992) and Tucker, Marvin, and Vivian (1991) with the purpose of developing an operational definition for romantic acts and for identifying specific courtship's scripts, people use while engaged in romantic relationships. The current operational definition for courtship behaviors proposed by Tucker (1992) consists of a romantic acts construct compose of thirteen items originally isolated through informal conversations with hundreds of people in a learning seminar context. …

Field of study: Education