Cross Sectional Study Of Passionate Love

The Study I chose to read about is titled, “Passionate Love and Anxiety: A Cross Generational Study”. This study is all about the feeling of Passionate Love throughout the lifespan. The study is a correlational, cross-sectional study in which the researchers look at four different age groups; adolescents, young adults, middle-age adults, and elderly. There are two different reasons the researchers carried out this study. The first reason was to see if a person’s development through adulthood changes their experience of passionate love. The second reason was to see whether anxious people were more motivated to seek passionate love.

For this study, the Passionate Love Scale and the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory were passed out to the participants. The surveys given had each participant answer questions on a scale of 1 to 9, and then their total was added together giving each of them a score. All the data collected from the surveys was quantitively. It does seem to be an appropriate method for the study because if qualitive data would have been used, it would have been harder

One strength of this study that in a pervious study done covering this topic, the researchers didn’t use the full PLS test which caused the results to show something that wasn’t necessarily true. This study used the full PLS test and the results showed. Another strength of the study is that this study also compared how men and women answered the PLS scores, where as the pervious study strictly just looked at the different age groups. A weakness of this study is that there is a low reliability of measurements on the scores. This is because the people are self-rating their feelings, so someone could be lying about how they feel. A second weakness is there could be a possible bias because in America people are encouraged to be “in love”. This stigma may pressure people into answering higher on the PLS test causing a change in the