1. In Milardo and Allan's (1997) overview of social networks, they discuss the effect of married couples' relations with friends.   They cite the findings that men married to women who have dense social networks tend to report lower marital satisfaction (Cotton, 1995) and that men married to women who have frequent contact with their close friends report much conflict and ambivalence in their marriages, as well as less love of their wives (Burger & Milardo, 1995).   What do you make of these findings?   Are the husbands less satisfied simply because they have less frequent contact with their wives?   Or is there something about the specific interactions that the wife has with her friends that influence the husband's satisfaction—a possible Sex and the City effect?

2. How would attachment or evolutionary theory approach the idea that Milardo and Allan touch on that wives who report more social contact with friends have husbands who report lower marital satisfaction?

3. In Milardo et al. (1983), the researchers predict and find that individuals in the early stages of courtship, compared to individuals in the later stages of courtship, will show a greater frequency and duration of interactions with members of their social network other than their partner.   What about the early stage of intense romantic love called limerance?   Is it possible that an individual in the early stages of courtship could actually want to spend most of his or her time with a partner instead of other social network members? 

4. In Milardo’s paper on developing close relationships, the SIR measure they use is based on the number of interactions per day. It was briefly discussed in class that network studies are moving less toward the number of interactions and more toward the quality of these interactions. How can the quality of interactions be measured, and effectively quantified? Can it? If the number of social interactions proves to be a factor that (negatively) influences relationship quality, does the can high quality interactions with few people be detrimental to a relationship as well?

5. What effects would you expect personality to have on the a) makeup of an individual's social network, b) the size of their social network, and c) their social interactions?   Could personality effects be problematic for social network theories?

6. In the Green et al. paper on third-party forgiveness, they explain that a limitation of the study was not using behavioral or non-self report measures of forgiveness. How could behavioral evidence be taken into account? What individual behaviors promote forgiveness or signify less of an ability to forgive someone? Additionally, what levels (if any) of personal control do individuals have when deciding to forgive someone or not forgive?

7. Could the third-party forgiveness effect found by Green et al. (2008) be present in contexts other than romantic relationships? 

8. Agnew et al. (2001) found that friends of the couple (especially friends of couples who disclose many relationship details) can better predict relationship persistence than the couple members.   Would this finding hold up across different types of relationships, such as open relationships and long-distance relationships?

9. One drawback to the study by Etcheverry and Agnew is that they measured the beliefs of network members as perceived by couple members, rather than the actual beliefs of network members themselves. Do you think that perceptions of what the network members believe about a relationship and what they actually believe could be significantly different? If so, might a couple member choose to think that network member’s beliefs are different than they actually are?