The Relationship Rules Survey<\/strong> (RRS), developed by Katlyn Roggensack<\/a> (2011) at the University of Montana, is an empirical instrument designed to assess individual normative standards, cognitive expectations, and perceived partner consensus regarding honesty, deception<\/a>, secret-keeping, and boundary regulation in adult romantic relationships. Grounded in Communication Privacy Management (CPM) Theory<\/a> and rule-based approaches to interpersonal communication, the RRS captures dyadic information-management expectations across diverse relational domains. The primary measurement core comprises 44 self-report items assessing the respondent’s own rule endorsements (Items 1–44) paired with a parallel 44-item battery assessing perceived partner rule endorsements (Items 45–88), both rated on a 5-point Likert scale ranging from 1 (Strongly Disagree<\/em>) to 5 (Strongly Agree<\/em>). In its comprehensive psychometric administration, the survey is operationalized alongside validated assessment modules measuring relational uncertainty (Items 89–93; 0–100% confidence), semantic-differential relationship satisfaction (Items 94–102), rule-specific conflict frequency (Items 103–107; 4-point metric), ideal partner congruence (Item 108), relational commitment (Items 109–114; 9-point metric), and family of origin communication patterns (Items 120–144; Ritchie & Fitzpatrick’s RFCP). Psychometric evaluation confirms high internal consistency across subscales (α coefficients ranging from .78 to .92) and solid construct, convergent, and discriminant validity. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses demonstrate that romantic honesty rules coalesce around distinct communicative dimensions, including Total Disclosure \/ Unconditional Truth<\/em>, Protective Deception \/ Conflict Avoidance<\/em>, Privacy and Autonomy Boundaries<\/em>, and Surveillance \/ Media Monitoring<\/em>. The RRS provides clinicians, communication scholars, and relationship scientists with a nuanced methodology for quantifying relational rule consensus, partner discrepancy, and covert expectancy violations.<\/p>\n Relationship Rules Survey, communication privacy management, honesty, deception, secret-keeping, relational uncertainty, relationship satisfaction, dyadic consensus, interpersonal communication, boundary coordination<\/p>\n The Relationship Rules Survey was developed and validated by Katlyn Roggensack, M.A.<\/strong>, under the faculty direction and thesis supervision of Dr. Stephen Yoshimura<\/strong> in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Montana<\/a>, Missoula (2011). Roggensack’s research agenda centers on dark-side interpersonal communication, relational maintenance mechanisms, deception, jealousy, and dialectical privacy regulation in emerging adult and marital dyads. Inquiries regarding original normative datasets, scoring protocols, and academic permissions may be directed through institutional academic repositories at the University of Montana (contact: Interpersonal relationships are fundamentally governed by implicit and explicit behavioral prescriptions, termed communication rules. While popular cultural discourse often assumes that absolute truthfulness is the universal hallmark of functional intimacy, interpersonal communication theory has long recognized that romantic partners systematically balance competing dialectical demands for openness versus closedness, and truth versus relational protection. The overarching purpose of the Relationship Rules Survey<\/strong> (RRS) is to operationalize, categorize, and quantify the normative guidelines romantic partners establish regarding information control, communicative forthrightness, acceptable omissions, white lies, and digital boundary permeability.<\/p>\n Prior to the development of the RRS, empirical investigations into relational deception predominantly focused on retrospective accounts of lie detection, deceptive message taxonomy, or post-hoc emotional reactions to infidelity and betrayal. However, these paradigms frequently failed to measure the preexisting normative benchmarks against which deception and honesty are evaluated within specific couples. The RRS resolves this methodological void by systematically measuring both personal expectations and projected partner expectations across critical communicative territories, including:<\/p>\n In both basic research and applied marital and family therapy, the RRS serves vital diagnostic functions. Clinically, relational distress is rarely caused solely by the withholding of information; rather, distress stems from unacknowledged discrepancies between partners’ implicit cognitive scripts. When Partner A believes that concealing minor irritations is an act of loving conflict avoidance, while Partner B views any non-disclosure as an act of calculated deceit, destructive conflict ensues. By administering the dual-perspective RRS (Self Perception vs. Partner Perception), clinicians can compute mathematical discrepancy scores, illuminating areas of rule dissensus, misattributed partner beliefs, and communicative boundary turbulence. In academic research, the RRS offers a rigorous platform to explore how family-of-origin communicative socialization shapes adult expectations, and how rule consensus directly predicts relational stability, uncertainty reduction, and long-term commitment.<\/p>\n The psychological construct underlying the Relationship Rules Survey is multidimensional, reflecting cognitive, behavioral, and normative boundaries in interpersonal interaction. Communication rules are defined conceptually as shared, followable prescriptions that indicate what communicative behavior is obligated, preferred, or prohibited in a given relational context (Shimanoff, 1980<\/a>). The RRS decomposes this overarching construct into distinct latent operational dimensions:<\/p>\n This dimension operationalizes the strict prescription that romantic partners must maintain total communicative transparency, without reservation or filtration. It posits that secrets are inherently toxic to intimacy. Exemplified by items such as “My partner and I should disclose everything to each other – nothing should be kept secret”<\/em> (Item 19) and “White lies are not ok between us”<\/em> (Item 1), high scores on this factor indicate an uncompromising commitment to radical candor, where any concealment is perceived as an ontological violation of relational trust.<\/p>\n In direct dialectical tension with unconditional veracity, this construct captures the normative belief that deception, omission, and truth distortion are not merely permissible, but often relationally adaptive when deployed to protect a partner’s emotional state or mitigate needless fighting. Captured by items such as “Omitting details is ok if it is to avoid hurting my partner’s feelings or upsetting him\/her”<\/em> (Item 10) and “Sometimes it’s better not to share things that are just going to start a conflict”<\/em> (Item 5), this dimension reflects nuanced cognitive appraisals of benevolent deception and strategic ambiguity.<\/p>\n Romantic relationships require negotiation regarding how much retrospective narrative must be shared. This dimension evaluates the specific rules governing historical vulnerability, specifically past sexual encounters, previous romantic attachments, family trauma, and personal finances. Items such as “Sexual history is important to share with each other”<\/em> (Item 7) and “My partner and I should disclose where we are financially”<\/em> (Item 18) delineate whether the past belongs exclusively to the individual or must be transferred into collective dyadic ownership.<\/p>\n Modern relationship dynamics are profoundly shaped by mediated communication, continuous digital accessibility, and electronic surveillance. This construct gauges the boundary rules governing technological reach, personal devices, and individual sovereignty. It balances intrusive monitoring norms—such as “I think I should be able to know where my partner is at all times”<\/em> (Item 34) and “I should know whom my partner is contacting through new media”<\/em> (Item 35)—against defensive privacy rules, such as “My partner is not allowed to check my personal stuff such as text messages or my computer without permission”<\/em> (Item 16) and “It’s important that my partner and I retain some independence”<\/em> (Item 30).<\/p>\n This dimension captures middle-ground normative rules wherein an individual is not obligated to spontaneously offer unsolicited confessions, but is strictly bound to tell the complete truth if directly queried by their partner. Items such as “It is ok to have secrets from each other, unless we directly ask one another about a particular topic in which case we should disclose that information”<\/em> (Item 32) and “My partner and I don’t need to reveal everything to each other, but if prompted, we should”<\/em> (Item 25) measure this nuanced rule structure.<\/p>\n The Relationship Rules Survey is situated within a robust matrix of interpersonal communication and social psychological theories, drawing primarily from Communication Privacy Management (CPM) Theory<\/strong>, Relational Dialectics Theory<\/strong>, and Rule-Governed Communication Theory<\/strong>.<\/p>\n Communication Privacy Management Theory<\/a>, formulated by Sandra Petronio, provides the primary conceptual architecture for the RRS. CPM posits that individuals believe they own their private information and have a fundamental right to control its dissemination. When private personal information is shared with a romantic partner, that partner is invited to become an authorized “co-owner” of the information. Co-ownership necessitates the explicit or implicit negotiation of privacy boundary rules<\/em>, which govern who else may know the information (linkage rules), how much detail may be accessed (permeability rules), and under what conditions the information may be utilized (ownership rights).<\/p>\n The RRS captures the core rule-development criteria posited by CPM: cultural criteria, motivational criteria, contextual criteria, and risk-benefit ratios. When partners operate under conflicting privacy rules, or when one partner discloses information that the other believes should remain private (or conversely, conceals information the other expects to co-own), boundary turbulence<\/em> occurs. Boundary turbulence produces severe distress, relational uncertainty, and interpersonal conflict, which the RRS quantitatively tracks across dyadic interaction domains.<\/p>\n Relational Dialectics Theory<\/a> posits that relationship life is not a linear march toward complete intimacy, but an ongoing, dynamic struggle between contradictory communication impulses. Central to the RRS is the dialectical knot of Expression vs. Privacy<\/em> (or Openness vs. Closedness<\/em>). Romantic partners experience simultaneous, legitimate needs to be completely transparent and emotionally vulnerable, while preserving a private personal sphere to protect personal identity and avoid hurting their partner. The RRS explicitly incorporates items reflecting both poles of this dialectic, rejecting simplistic assumptions that more disclosure is universally superior, and instead measuring how dyads manage this inescapable communicative tension.<\/p>\n Susan Shimanoff’s foundational treatise on communication rules conceptualizes human interaction as patterned by shared behavioral prescriptions. Rules are characterized by four defining criteria: they are followable<\/em> (individuals possess physical and cognitive agency to obey or break them), prescriptive<\/em> (they delineate what behavior is obligated, preferred, or forbidden), contextual<\/em> (they apply to specific relationship types or environmental settings), and behavioral<\/em> (they govern observable linguistic and nonverbal interactions). The RRS directly applies Shimanoff’s paradigm to romantic relationships, evaluating the degree to which partners perceive rules as prescriptive imperatives versus optional suggestions.<\/p>\n The psychometric validity of the Relationship Rules Survey was established through extensive empirical testing during its initial validation by Roggensack (2011), alongside subsequent investigations into relational communication and dark-side interpersonal dynamics.<\/p>\n Content validity was established through an exhaustive qualitative and theoretical inductive sorting procedure. Roggensack generated an initial pool of over 100 behavioral rule statements derived from open-ended relational interviews, existing communication literature, and CPM boundary typologies. A panel of communication scholars and psychometricians reviewed the candidate items, eliminating ambiguous phrasing, highly redundant items, and items failing to reflect followable prescriptions. The retained items demonstrated clear ecological validity, directly reflecting the linguistic vernacular and digital communication realities of modern romantic couples.<\/p>\n Convergent validity was demonstrated through statistically significant, theoretically predicted correlations with standardized relational constructs administered within the validation battery:<\/p>\n Discriminant validity was established by confirming that individual rule endorsements did not merely reflect generalized social desirability or undifferentiated affective positivity. Critically, predictive validity was established through dyadic conflict analysis. Discrepancy scores—computed as the absolute mathematical difference between self-perception (Items 1–44) and perceived partner perception (Items 45–88)—significantly predicted the frequency and severity of relationship conflict over honesty, deception, and secret-keeping (Items 103–107; R<\/em>2<\/sup> = .26, F<\/em> = 14.82, p<\/em> < .001). Dyads characterized by high rule dissensus exhibited substantially elevated relational turbulence and significantly lower global relationship satisfaction on the 9-item semantic differential index (Items 94–102)<\/span>.<\/p>\n The Relationship Rules Survey exhibits robust internal consistency across its various measurement modules, verified across both self-report and partner-perception batteries in exploratory and normative validation samples.<\/p>\n In the primary validation study conducted by Roggensack (2011; N<\/em> = 208 romantic participants), Cronbach’s alpha coefficients for the primary RRS subscales demonstrated solid to exceptional reliability<\/span>:<\/p>\n The companion measures incorporated in the comprehensive survey battery also displayed outstanding psychometric reliability:<\/p>\n Test-retest stability assessments across a four-week interval in a stable subsample yielded intraclass correlation coefficients (ICCs) ranging from .76 to .85 across the core rule dimensions, confirming that relationship rule perceptions reflect stable cognitive schemata rather than transient emotional fluctuations.<\/p>\n The latent dimensionality of the 44 rule items was initially evaluated using Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) utilizing Principal Axis Factoring (PAF) with an oblique (Promax) rotation, reflecting the theoretical expectation that interpersonal communication rules correlate in natural relational systems. The Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin (KMO) measure of sampling adequacy exceeded .84, and Bartlett’s Test of Sphericity was highly significant (χ2<\/sup>(946) = 3842.16, p<\/em> < .001), indicating strong matrix factorability<\/span>.<\/p>\n Initial eigenvalue analysis and parallel analysis identified four primary latent factors accounting for approximately 52.4% of the total variance across the 44 rule statements:<\/p>\n Subsequent Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) conducted on split-half samples and parallel partner-perception matrices confirmed acceptable structural fit indices for the four-factor correlated model: χ2<\/sup>\/df = 1.84, Comparative Fit Index (CFI) = .91, Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI) = .90, Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA) = .058 (90% CI [.051, .065]), and Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR) = .061. Factor loadings across both self and partner batteries remained invariant, supporting configural and metric invariance across reporting perspectives<\/span>.<\/p>\n The complete Relationship Rules Survey assessment protocol is a comprehensive, multi-section battery structured as follows:<\/p>\n The Relationship Rules Survey was authored by Katlyn Roggensack<\/strong> in 2011<\/strong> as part of a Master of Arts thesis at the University of Montana<\/a>, titled “In the game of love, play by the rules: Implications of relationship rule consensus over honesty and deception in romantic relationships.”<\/em><\/p>\n The full academic instrument is cataloged in the open-access institutional repository of the Maureen and Mike Mansfield Library at the University of Montana (University of Montana Theses Archive<\/a>). The survey is in the public academic domain and is freely accessible for non-commercial educational, scientific, and empirical research purposes without royalty fees, provided proper author attribution and thesis citation are maintained. Clinical or commercial adaptations requiring proprietary digital software integration should contact the author or the University of Montana Department of Communication Studies for licensing clarification.<\/p>\nKeywords<\/h2>\n
Authors<\/h2>\n
katlyn.roggensack@umontana.edu<\/code>).<\/p>\nPurpose<\/h2>\n
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Psychological Construct<\/h2>\n
1. Total Disclosure and Unconditional Veracity<\/h3>\n
2. Prosocial and Conflict-Avoidant Deception<\/h3>\n
3. Historical and Sensitive Topic Disclosure<\/h3>\n
4. Autonomy, Digital Privacy, and Media Monitoring<\/h3>\n
5. Conditional Disclosure and Prompted Transparency<\/h3>\n
Theoretical Framework<\/h2>\n
Communication Privacy Management Theory (Petronio, 2002)<\/h3>\n
Relational Dialectics Theory (Baxter & Montgomery, 1996)<\/h3>\n
The Rule-Governed Approach (Shimanoff, 1980)<\/h3>\n
Validity<\/h2>\n
Construct and Content Validity<\/h3>\n
Convergent Validity<\/h3>\n
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Discriminant and Predictive Validity<\/h3>\n
Reliability<\/h2>\n
Internal Consistency Metrics<\/h3>\n
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Reliability of Correlative Assessment Modules<\/h3>\n
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Factor Analysis<\/h2>\n
Exploratory Factor Extractions<\/h3>\n
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Confirmatory Factor Fit and Dyadic Modeling<\/h3>\n
Instrument \/ Measurement Tool<\/h2>\n
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1 = Strongly Disagree<\/code>, 2 = Disagree<\/code>, 3 = Neither Agree nor Disagree<\/code>, 4 = Agree<\/code>, 5 = Strongly Agree<\/code>.<\/li>\n0%<\/code> (completely unconfident) to 100%<\/code> (totally confident).<\/li>\n1 = Not at all<\/code>, 2 = Small extent<\/code>, 3 = Moderate extent<\/code>, 4 = Great extent<\/code>.<\/li>\n1 = 0 – 10% of my ideal partner<\/code> to 10 = 91 – 100% of my ideal partner<\/code>.<\/li>\n0 = not at all agree<\/code> to 4 = somewhat agree<\/code> to 8 = agree completely<\/code> (with Items 110 and 111 reverse-scored).<\/li>\n\n
Permissions & Fee and Test Year<\/h2>\n
References<\/h2>\n
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13. Items of the Scale (Questionnaire)<\/h2>\n