Measuring Love in Romantic Relationships - Essay Example

With 81 studies representing 103 samples and 19,387 individuals, these provided data for the meta-analysis which Graham substantially used to come up with his conclusion. In this study, Graham simply illustrates his point of inquiry of finding what usually one is measuring when it comes to looking at self-reported love.

The topic of love is one of the most common concepts discussed in the academe and even in daily living in every part of the world where there is vibrant dominance of the human population. This is usually the case simply because humans have emotions that substantially allow them to feel love and be loved (Feldman, 2010). Thus, this study by Graham is relevant to the complex and diverse human population simply because normal people at some point in their lives should have felt love and being loved. It is important to understand whether a self-reported measure of love involves high-order factors to identify the real essence and concept of love.

This is important considering that the human population is diverse and this leads to having highly differentiated demographic characteristics. This is one of the most significant points or limitations explicated by Graham in his study. In other words, to make his study substantial enough to provide more meaningful information, Graham should have identified some demographic variables that could be correlated with love measures. In this regard, his reader would be given a substantial idea of any significant association of demographic variables with love measures. This should be further elaborated knowing the fact that individuals used in the study may have a different cultural backgrounds, social orientations, and varying perspectives in life. Thus, this underlying concept may just pose a significant threat to the validity of his result.

However, Graham made a remarkable revelation at some point, which would allow someone to evaluate the common conceptualizations of love. His study therefore could be highly recommended to modern studies that seek to understand more about this special subject of love, especially on the ground of quantifying it. The attempt to quantify love marks the revolutionary act of understanding it not only from the perspective of human emotion but as something with significant value that could be translated from words to numbers for future use. Therefore, Graham’s attempt to conduct this study about measuring love in a romantic relationship using a meta-analysis makes sense at some point. In the first place, it tries to minimize the complexity of love as a subject matter. Read More