Research on abuse and violence – which overall increases across adolescence and young adulthood before declining - has tended to be siloed in fields such as peer bullying and violence, street violence, or intimate partner violence. The problem with this approach is that individuals often bring the same communication patterns to different relationships. Further, interactions in one part of our lives often spill into other relationships. This is true in the present moment as well as over time, such that past interpersonal experiences can affect future behavior and relationships.

With funding from NIJ, NORC Principal Investigators Elizabeth Mumford, Bruce Taylor and Weiwei Liu, and University of Iowa’s Mark Berg, designed iCOR to determine the nature, incidence, and coincidence of forms of interpersonal conflict and resulting conflict management styles. The NORC research team created a household cohort of young adults (ages 18-32) to ask them about their interactions with a range of counterparts, how they handled conflicts that might have arisen, and the extent to which victimization and offending have overlapped. 

For those young adults reporting intimate relationships, additional perspective was drawn from information reported by both the “Prime” respondents and their intimate “Partners” on themselves, each other, and conflicts with other parties. The resulting dyadic models allow researchers to circumvent respondent favorability bias in survey responses, providing novel third-party reports of Prime respondents’ behavior in conflict situations. Moreover, building on this foundational information drawn from three waves of longitudinal survey data collection, iCOR participants, responding to daily prompts, shared contextual details and feelings defining conflicts without the haze of retrospective summation. 

Additional NIJ research supported daily diary data from a subsample of the iCOR cohort over the course of 21 days to capture more detailed contextual descriptors of conflicts, resolutions and consequences.

iCOR research revealed that young adults are most likely to use verbally abusive tactics in conflicts involving intimate partners, with decreasing reliance on this approach with family and friends, and with strangers. And yet perpetrating physical violence is reported by nearly 10% of young adults regardless of their counterpart in the conflict. Further, daily diaries and surveys completed after intervals of months suggest that when young adults experience depressive symptoms, their mood may lead to deficits in their communication skills that increase their risk of involvement in disputes and aggressive interactions, that is, when they are not self-isolated and disengaging from their relationships. Not surprisingly, at least for intimate relationships, individual characteristics are usually not as central to aggression as interactive processes between two partners. These and other results highlight the importance of dyadic data in the study of conflicts, conflict management, and abuse, as well as the distinctive value of capturing day-to-day context as well as patterns that appear over longer periods of time.