Quality of the Romantic Alternatives

What it measures

The scale measures how attractive a person perceives their alternatives to their current romantic partner to be — including dating someone else or simply spending time independently — a well-established predictor of relationship commitment. Originally developed as part of an investment-model framework for relationship commitment, it was used here to examine psychological antecedents of financial infidelity between romantic partners.

Response format

7-point Likert

Scale items

• My alternatives are attractive to me (dating another, spending time with friends or on my own, etc.)
• My alternatives to our relationship are close to ideal (dating another, spending time with friends or on my own, etc.).
• If I weren’t dating my partner, I would do fine - I would find another appealing person to date.
• The people other than my partner with whom I might become involved are very appealing.
• My needs for intimacy, companionship, etc., could easily be fulfilled in an alternative relationship.

Full scale items shown. Always cite the original source when using this scale in research.

Usage notes & scoring

This is a subscale of Rusbult, Martz, and Agnew's (1998) established Investment Model Scale, used by Garbinsky et al. (2020) with married adults recruited via MTurk — a companion to the Investment in the Relationship scale from the same study. The original authors demonstrated strong internal consistency and validity for the broader investment measure; here it showed good reliability (α = .91). Validity wasn't separately reassessed by Garbinsky et al.

Recommended companion scales

Citation

Garbinsky, E.N., Gladstone, J.J., Nikolova, H., & Olson, J.G. (2020). Love, Lies, and Money: Financial Infidelity in Romantic Relationships. Journal of Consumer Research, 47(1), 1–24.

Keywords