Relationship Assessment Scale

Abstract

The Relationship Assessment Scale (RAS), developed by social psychologist Susan S. Hendrick in 1988, is an established, psychometrically sound, brief self-report instrument designed to evaluate global subjective relationship satisfaction. While historically prominent instruments such as the Dyadic Adjustment Scale (DAS; Spanier, 1976) and the Marital Adjustment Test (MAT; Locke & Wallace, 1959) were developed specifically for married dyads and often conflated satisfaction with behavioral adjustment, conflict resolution tactics, and shared activities, the RAS was formulated to assess general relationship appraisal across diverse relationship types, including dating, cohabiting, non-heterosexual, and married couples. The scale consists of 7 items scored along a 5-point Likert-type continuum, capturing core dimensions of partner need fulfillment, general contentment, comparative appraisal against alternative dyads, regret over relational initiation, fulfillment of early expectations, affective devotion (love), and perceived problem severity.

Extensive psychometric investigations consistently demonstrate robust internal consistency across heterogeneous populations, with Cronbach’s alpha coefficients regularly ranging from .86 to .91, and solid test-retest reliability ($r > .80$). Confirmatory factor analyses (CFA) corroborate an essentially unidimensional latent construct, explaining roughly 45% to 65% of the total variance across diverse demographic cohorts. Modern psychometric evaluations employing Item Response Theory (IRT) indicate that the RAS functions with high measurement precision across moderate to low satisfaction levels, making it exceptionally sensitive to relational distress, deterioration, and the risk of prospective dissolution. This article delineates the theoretical foundations, latent structure, empirical validity, reliability parameters, clinical diagnostic utility, and verbatim items of the Relationship Assessment Scale.

Keywords

Relationship Assessment Scale, RAS, relationship satisfaction, dyadic appraisal, psychometrics, Susan S. Hendrick, marital quality, couple assessment, interdependence theory, item response theory

Authors

The Relationship Assessment Scale was developed by Susan S. Hendrick, Ph.D., an American psychologist and Professor Emerita in the Department of Psychological Sciences at Texas Tech University. Dr. Hendrick has published extensively in the fields of close relationships, love styles, gender roles, and relationship satisfaction. The instrument’s psychometric architecture was further refined and validated in collaboration with Clyde Hendrick, Ph.D., also of Texas Tech University, and Amy Dicke. Inquiries regarding academic and theoretical applications of the scale are typically directed toward Dr. Susan S. Hendrick’s archival research at Texas Tech University.

Purpose

The primary purpose of the Relationship Assessment Scale is to provide a brief, versatile, psychometrically robust measure of an individual’s subjective appraisal of their romantic partnership. Prior to the development of the RAS, the field of close relationships research relied predominantly on comprehensive, multi-item inventories such as the 32-item Dyadic Adjustment Scale (DAS; Spanier, 1976) and the 15-item Marital Adjustment Test (MAT; Locke & Wallace, 1959). Although these legacy instruments possess historical validity, they suffer from significant conceptual and methodological limitations that hindered contemporary empirical progress.

First, traditional marital adjustment inventories were explicitly formulated for married, traditionally cohabiting heterosexual couples. Their item content frequently presumed shared financial arrangements, common household management, joint social circles, and structural domestic tasks. Consequently, these instruments exhibited poor face and ecological validity when applied to non-marital dating couples, non-cohabiting partners, or non-traditional romantic dyads. The RAS addressed this demographic constraint by deploying universal, non-institution-specific relational language applicable to any romantic configuration, irrespective of marital status, living arrangement, sexual orientation, or relationship duration.

Second, legacy inventories frequently conflated subjective satisfaction—the internal affective and cognitive appraisal of the relationship—with behavioral adjustment, such as the frequency of arguments, division of chores, or engagement in joint leisure activities. By packing disparate behavioural correlates into a global index, researchers encountered collinearity issues and circularity: one could not test whether conflict resolution styles predicted relationship satisfaction because conflict resolution was already baked into the criterion metric itself. The RAS circumvents this theoretical conflation by functioning strictly as an assessment of global subjective satisfaction, treating behavioral processes, communication patterns, and external circumstances as independent predictors rather than intrinsic components of the scale.

In research settings, the brevity of the 7-item RAS significantly curtails participant burden, reducing survey attrition, respondent fatigue, and measurement error in expansive longitudinal batteries, daily diary studies, and ecological momentary assessments (EMA). In clinical contexts, such as couple and family therapy, the RAS operates as a rapid screening measure, establishing baseline dyadic distress, tracking weekly intervention trajectories, and objectively quantifying treatment efficacy across time.

Psychological Construct

The Relationship Assessment Scale measures global relationship satisfaction, conceptualized as a subjective, cognitive-affective evaluation of the overall quality, desirability, and personal reward-to-cost ratio of an ongoing romantic partnership. Rather than parsing relationship health into fragmented subdomains, the scale isolates the overarching latent judgment that individuals construct regarding their dyadic experience.

Core Manifest Dimensions of the Construct

Although the RAS operates psychometrically as a unidimensional instrument, its 7 items deliberately operationalize several critical facets of subjective relational appraisal identified in contemporary relationship science:

• Partner Need Fulfillment (Item 1): Evaluates perceived responsiveness and instrumental-emotional support. It reflects the degree to which an individual feels their emotional, physical, and psychological needs are recognized and satisfied by their partner, serving as an indicator of dyadic attunement.
• Global Relational Contentment (Item 2): Taps into generalized, non-contingent satisfaction. This item measures the raw affective valence—positive versus negative—associated with the holistic concept of the partnership.
• Comparative Quality (Item 3): Invokes social comparison processes. In accordance with social psychological frameworks, an individual’s evaluation of their partnership is not formed in isolation; it is calibrated against perceived peer relationships and normative reference standards within their cultural milieu.
• Dissolution Contemplation and Regret (Item 4 – Reverse Scored): Evaluates the emergence of retrospective cognitive regret. Fleeting or recurring thoughts that one should not have initiated the partnership provide an index of ambivalence, deep-seated distress, and structural instability.
• Expectation Disconfirmation (Item 5): Measures cognitive appraisal anchored against prior psychological expectations. Drawing from expectancy-disconfirmation paradigms, satisfaction is modeled as the psychological distance between baseline expectations of what romance should entail and experiential reality.
• Affective Commitment and Love (Item 6): Assesses the magnitude of emotional attachment and perceived love directed toward the partner. This dimension captures the fundamental motivational and emotional bedrock sustaining long-term relational perseverance.
• Problem Proliferation and Friction (Item 7 – Reverse Scored): Appraises the subjective density of unresolved relational strain, conflict, and behavioral discord. Rather than enumerating specific points of contention, it measures the individual’s global perception of the relationship’s operational difficulty.

Theoretical Framework

The theoretical architecture of the Relationship Assessment Scale is anchored principally within Interdependence Theory (Thibaut & Kelley, 1959; Kelley & Thibaut, 1978) and its direct extension, the Investment Model of relationship processes formulated by Caryl Rusbult (1980, 1983).

Interdependence Theory and Comparison Levels

Interdependence Theory posits that individuals evaluate interactions with romantic partners in terms of outcomes: rewards accrued minus costs incurred. Thibaut and Kelley conceptualized two distinct subjective cognitive standards by which human beings evaluate relational outcomes:

1. Comparison Level ($CL$): The baseline standard of what an individual feels they deserve or expect from a relationship, constructed from past experiences, social exposure, and personal self-worth. When current outcomes exceed $CL$, the individual experiences subjective satisfaction. The RAS directly interrogates this mechanism through Item 5 (fulfillment of original expectations) and Item 1 (partner meeting fundamental needs).
2. Comparison Level for Alternatives ($CL_{alt}$): The lowest level of outcomes an individual will accept in light of available alternatives (e.g., entering another relationship or remaining single). This governs relational dependence and stability. Items assessing comparative standing against other relationships (Item 3) and regret over relationship initiation (Item 4) implicitly force an individual to weigh their present status against perceived structural and counterfactual alternatives.

Cognitive Appraisal and Emotion Theories

Beyond social exchange paradigms, the scale draws conceptually from Cognitive Appraisal Theories of emotion (e.g., Lazarus, 1991). In these models, relational emotions do not arise directly from external partner behaviors, but from the subjective, secondary cognitive appraisals assigned to those behaviors. A partner who arrives home late may be appraised as negligent by one person (precipitating distress) or as hardworking by another (precipitating gratitude). The RAS measures these synthesized cognitive appraisals rather than raw behavioral inputs, yielding a purer psychological index of how the relationship is processed internally by the subjective mind.

Validity

The Relationship Assessment Scale has been extensively evaluated across diverse socio-cultural, clinical, and experimental contexts, exhibiting exceptional construct, convergent, discriminant, and predictive validity.

Convergent and Criterion Validity

In her original psychometric validation study, Hendrick (1988) administered the RAS alongside the Dyadic Adjustment Scale (Spanier, 1976) to a sample of university dating couples. The RAS demonstrated a powerful correlation with the total DAS score ($r = .80$), indicating substantial construct overlap while utilizing less than a quarter of the items. In a follow-up psychometric evaluation featuring both dating and married participants, Hendrick, Dicke, and Hendrick (1998) verified that the RAS correlated strongly with the Marital Adjustment Test (Locke & Wallace, 1959; $r = .73$), the Kansas Marital Satisfaction Scale ($r = .84$), and the satisfaction subscale of the Investment Model Scale (Rusbult et al., 1998; $r = .82$).

Discriminant Validity

The RAS discriminates effectively between satisfaction and independent psychological constructs. Hendrick (1988) demonstrated that social desirability bias, measured via the Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Scale, correlated minimally with RAS scores (typically between $r = .12$ and $r = .22$), proving that high RAS scores do not merely reflect an acquiescent tendency to present one’s life in an overly favorable light. Furthermore, studies examining personality traits using the Five-Factor Model have established that while Neuroticism correlates moderately negatively with RAS scores (around $r = -.25$ to $-.35$), the scale retains substantial unique variance independent of general negative affectivity.

Predictive and Longitudinal Validity

The predictive utility of the RAS has been corroborated in longitudinal investigations assessing relationship stability versus dissolution. Hendrick, Dicke, and Hendrick (1998) demonstrated that couples who were still together several months following initial testing had scored significantly higher on the baseline RAS than couples who subsequently dissolved their relationships ($p < .001$). In experimental paradigms, such as Aron, Norman, Aron, McKenna, and Heyman (2000), the RAS successfully captured distinct changes in experienced relationship quality following novel and arousing shared dyadic tasks, even after controlling for relationship social desirability. Similarly, Gable, Reis, Impett, and Asher (2004) employed the RAS to verify that enthusiastic responses to capitalization attempts predicted elevated relationship well-being and satisfaction over time.

Modern Psychometric Precision (IRT Analysis)

In a large-scale psychometric investigation conducted by Funk and Rogge (2007) involving 5,315 online participants, modern Item Response Theory (IRT) models were applied to evaluate eight widely utilized relationship satisfaction measures. Although newer, hyper-optimized instruments like the Couples Satisfaction Index (CSI) were developed through that study, the RAS stood out among legacy short-form scales for possessing high discrimination parameters ($a$) across the lower-to-middle sections of the latent satisfaction continuum ($ heta$). This demonstrates that the RAS possesses robust statistical power for detecting relational distress and couples at risk for dissolution compared to longer, historical inventories.

Reliability

The reliability parameters of the Relationship Assessment Scale have been thoroughly scrutinized across hundreds of peer-reviewed empirical investigations worldwide, establishing exceptional internal consistency and temporal stability.

Internal Consistency

In the seminal validation paper by Hendrick (1988), the internal consistency of the 7-item instrument yielded a Cronbach’s alpha of $\alpha = .86$. In the subsequent re-examination across larger, heterogeneous samples of dating and married individuals, Hendrick, Dicke, and Hendrick (1998) documented an alpha of $\alpha = .87$. Subsequent meta-analytic evaluations (e.g., Graham, Diebels, & Barnow, 2011) examining reliability coefficients across decades of research demonstrated an aggregate mean alpha of $.88$, with empirical studies rarely reporting alphas below $.82$ or exceeding $.93$.

Temporal Stability (Test-Retest Reliability)

Because relationship satisfaction is a dynamic evaluative construct subject to daily events, systemic transitions, and dyadic processes, test-retest reliability must be contextualized within appropriate measurement windows. Across stable observational windows of 4 to 8 weeks in non-intervention samples, the RAS displays test-retest correlation coefficients consistently hovering between $r = .80$ and $r = .87$. Over prolonged intervals exceeding six months to one year, the coefficient naturally attenuates ($r \approx .60-.70$), accurately capturing genuine, longitudinal shifts in relational quality rather than measurement error.

Measurement Error and Precision

The Standard Error of Measurement (SEM) for the RAS remains consistently low across adult normative groups. When scores are computed as an item mean (scale range 1.00 to 5.00), the SEM is typically calculated at approximately $\pm 0.28$, offering clinicians a narrow confidence band to distinguish authentic therapeutic improvement from statistical noise.

Factor Analysis

Structural validation studies of the Relationship Assessment Scale predominantly support a parsimonious, robust unidimensional factor structure.

Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)

In the initial scale construction by Hendrick (1988), principal components analysis and common factor analysis on the 7 items revealed a single unrotated factor accounting for 46% of the total variance, with an eigenvalue exceeding 3.20. In Hendrick, Dicke, and Hendrick (1998), an EFA conducted on non-clinical couples similarly extracted a single dominant general factor accounting for 56% to 64% of the item variance. The scree test consistently displays a sharp drop-off after the primary factor, with no secondary factors reaching eigenvalues above 1.0.

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA)

Subsequent confirmatory structural analyses across varied international and cultural adaptations have evaluated both strictly unidimensional models and models incorporating methodological factors for the reverse-scored items. Representative standardized factor loadings ($lambda$) derived from typical structural equations are summarized below:

When evaluated via structural equation modeling (SEM), the single-factor model typically meets common contemporary standards for adequate model fit, provided that a correlated residual or error covariance between the two negatively phrased items (Item 4 and Item 7) is specified to account for method variance:

• Comparative Fit Index (CFI) $ge .96$
• Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI) $ge .95$
• Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA) $le .055$ (90% CI [.038, .071])
• Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR) $le .032$

Instrument / Measurement Tool

The operational specifications of the scale are structured as follows:

• Instrument Name: Relationship Assessment Scale (RAS)
• Original Author: Susan S. Hendrick, Ph.D. (1988)
• Target Population: Adults (aged 18+) currently engaged in any romantic partnership (dating, cohabiting, married, engaged).
• Administration Format: Self-administered paper-and-pencil or computerized questionnaire.
• Completion Time: Approximately 1 to 3 minutes.
• Number of Items: 7 items.
• Response Continuum: 5-point Likert-type response scale ranging from 1 (indicating low satisfaction, severe problems, or poor alignment) to 5 (indicating high satisfaction, deep love, or total alignment).
• Scoring Methodology:
  • Reverse Scored Items: Item 4 and Item 7 are reverse coded ($1 to 5, 2 to 4, 3 to 3, 4 to 2, 5 to 1$).
  • Scale Aggregation: Scores are calculated either as an item mean (summing all 7 items and dividing by 7, maintaining a continuous 1.00 to 5.00 metric) or as a raw summed score (ranging from 7 to 35).
  • Directionality: Higher aggregate scores indicate higher relationship satisfaction.
• Clinical and Practical Norms:
  • Satisfied/Non-Distressed Cohorts: Typically exhibit mean scores between 4.00 and 4.70 (sum: 28 to 33).
  • Distressed/Clinical Cutoff: Empirical research (e.g., Hendrick, 1988; Hendrick et al., 1998) demonstrates that an average score below 3.50 to 3.80 (sum < 25) serves as a sensitive diagnostic flag for significant dyadic distress and elevated risk of dissolution.

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Relationship Assessment Scale was formally published in 1988 by Susan S. Hendrick in the Journal of Marriage and the Family. As an academic psychometric tool, the scale is located in the academic public domain for non-commercial educational, scientific, and clinical research purposes, provided that appropriate bibliographic attribution is accorded to Hendrick (1988) and subsequent validation studies. No licensing fees or royalty payments are mandated for scholarly use. Commercial entities seeking to integrate the scale into for-profit proprietary software, employee wellness programs, or commercial clinical diagnostic products must review prevailing institutional copyright guidelines and obtain formal consent from the copyright holder or original author.

References

• Aron, A., Norman, C. C., Aron, E. N., McKenna, C., & Heyman, R. E. (2000). Couples’ shared participation in novel and arousing activities and experienced relationship quality. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 78(2), 273–284. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.78.2.273
• Funk, J. L., & Rogge, R. D. (2007). Testing the ruler with item response theory: Increasing precision of measurement for relationship satisfaction with the Couples Satisfaction Index. Journal of Family Psychology, 21(4), 572–583. https://doi.org/10.1037/0893-3200.21.4.572
• Gable, S. L., Reis, H. T., Impett, E. A., & Asher, E. R. (2004). What do you do when things go right? The intrapersonal and interpersonal benefits of sharing positive events. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 87(2), 228–245. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.87.2.228
• Graham, J. M., Diebels, K. J., & Barnow, Z. B. (2011). The reliability of relationship satisfaction: A reliability generalization meta-analysis. Journal of Family Psychology, 25(1), 39–48. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0022441
• Hendrick, S. S. (1988). A generic measure of relationship satisfaction. Journal of Marriage and the Family, 50(1), 93–98. https://doi.org/10.2307/352430
• Hendrick, S. S., Dicke, A., & Hendrick, C. (1998). The Relationship Assessment Scale. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 15(1), 137–142. https://doi.org/10.1177/0265407598151009
• Kelley, H. H., & Thibaut, J. W. (1978). Interpersonal relations: A theory of interdependence. John Wiley & Sons.
• Locke, H. J., & Wallace, K. M. (1959). Short marital-adjustment and prediction tests: Their reliability and validity. Marriage and Family Living, 21(3), 251–255. https://doi.org/10.2307/348022
• Rusbult, C. E. (1980). Commitment and satisfaction in romantic associations: A test of the investment model. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 16(2), 172–186. https://doi.org/10.1016/0022-1031(80)90007-4
• Rusbult, C. E., Martz, J. M., & Agnew, C. R. (1998). The Investment Model Scale: Measuring commitment level, satisfaction level, quality of alternatives, and investment size. Personal Relationships, 5(4), 357–387. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-6811.1998.tb00177.x
• Spanier, G. B. (1976). Measuring dyadic adjustment: New scales for assessing the quality of marriage and similar dyads. Journal of Marriage and the Family, 38(1), 15–28. https://doi.org/10.2307/350547
• Thibaut, J. W., & Kelley, H. H. (1959). The social psychology of groups. John Wiley & Sons.

13. Items of the Scale (Questionnaire)