ABSTRACT
In an effort to tailor the uncertainty construct to the context of close relationships, Knobloch and Solomon (1999) created a means of assessing the content and the sources of relational uncertainty. While being true to Berger and Calabrese’s (1975) early rendering of Uncertainty Reduction Theory (URT), Knobloch and colleagues depart from URT’s conceptualization of uncertainty in two significant ways. First, they focus on established relationships, limiting their measure to the doubts people experience in intimate associations rather than the ambiguity that may arise in other relationship phases. Second, although Berger and Calabrese conceptualized uncertainty as stemming from self, partner, and relationship sources, measurement efforts have focused chiefly on predicting a partner’s behavior (see for example Clatterbuck, 1979; Parks & Adelman, 1983). For these reasons, Knobloch and Solomon (1999) developed three measures that assess with whom the relational uncertainty lies (i.e., source [self, partner, relationship]) and what the nature of that relational uncertainty concerns (i.e., content [desire, evaluation, goals, norms, mutuality, definition, and future]).
