ABOUT

The Love Consortium is a collaboration among scientists. Join us!

THE MISSION

The Love Consortium is a digitally-connected community of researchers engaged in the advanced scientific study of high-quality social connections. Love Consortium members aspire to facilitate such research through collaborative opportunities that emerge from archived data. The Love Consortium Advisory Board, with support from members, facilitates the two core aspects of the mission: fostering connections among researchers and advancing the science.

Values

• Scientific innovation, rigor, and integrity

• Inclusion and open-mindedness

• Future-orientation

On Inclusion

Strategies

• Supporting rigorous research

• Training the next generation

• Outreach to foster and support collaborations

• Growth: evaluating processes, identifying lessons and opportunities, improving processes

We are committed to understanding human connection across all contexts and from the perspective of all identities. We aspire to facilitate collaborations among researchers from diverse backgrounds as well as advance the science of social relationships across race, ethnicity, gender, age, socio-economic status, religion, sexual orientation, identity, and experience. The Love Consortium is for everyone.

THE PEOPLE

BOARD OF ADVISORS

THE LOVE CONSORTIUM TEAM AT THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA AT CHAPEL HILL

Postdoctoral Scholars (AKA “The Love Think Tank”)

Graduate Student Representatives to The Love Consortium

UNC’s Odum Institute Data Archive

FUNDING

THE PAST AND THE FUTURE

Backdrop: The early seeds for The Love Consortium were planted around 2014. The Replicability Movement was putting the squeeze on junior investigators in relationship research, who required bigger sample sizes and more samples, yet had few resources to collect these expensive and time-consuming data; meanwhile, senior investigators had “extra” data on hand from prior studies and an interest in using it but no way to share that information. And more and more evidence was coming to light about the value of finding and maintaining high-quality, caring relationships (e.g., Holt-Lunstad, Smith, and Layton, 2010 ).

The Love Consortium capitalizes on technology to present a win-win-win solution for junior scholars, for Principal Investigators, and for the field.

The Past

2016: A survey of relationship researchers who had attended the Close Relationships Preconference at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology Annual Meeting revealed that there was great interest: in just a quick survey, 42 Principal Investigators indicated that they had data and were interested in collaborating with it. Their responses revealed at least 123 datasets with a wide variety of methods, such as experience sampling, longitudinal follow-up assessments, biological samples, videorecorded conversations, psychophysiological assessments, experiments, behavioral measures, and more.

2017: A grant proposal was submitted to the John Templeton Foundation.

2018: The grant was funded.

2018, December 1st: The Love Consortium Board of Directors got to work on developing the mission, the values, and the activities, working from around the world via video web conferencing.

2019, April 25-27th: The Love Consortium Inaugural Meeting and the first in-person meeting of the Board of Directors were held in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.  And so we began.

The Future

Short-term (present – January 2020):

• Spread the word about The Love Consortium Dataverse.

• Encourage PIs to describe their datasets in The Love Consortium Dataverse.

• Develop a Frequently Asked Questions resource.

Medium-term (October 2019 – November 2021):

• Foster high-caliber research on the Science of Love, including

  • administering small research grants to trainees.

  • hosting additional in-person events.

• Develop collaborative tools for researchers, hosted on The Love Consortium website, facilitated by feedback from members.

• Draw attention to scientific advances enabled by use of collaborative leveraging of data from across labs.

Long-term:

The Love Consortium resources evolve to continue to advance the science of love for years to come.