Marriage enrichment: a critical assessment of the couples communication program model

Abstract

Marital enrichment is a new professional area in the applied family field which surfaced in the early l960’s and has expanded rapidly throughout the United States. Many see this exciting advance as a significant resource for attempting to alleviate the major social problem of marital dysfunction.

The underlying motivation for this research was to assess the effectiveness of marital enrichment (in particular, the Couples Communication Program Model) in producing change in the marital relationship within the framework of a number of perceived short-comings in the marital enrichment research literature. This research examined the experiential component of marital enrichment programs in an attempt to determine whether it is a necessary and effective change-producing element. Additionally, the issue of conventionalization was addressed as a possible contaminant of self-report measures which have been so widely employed in enrichment research. To assess durability of any possible change, a three-month follow-up study of all groups was conducted. Further, this research tested the utilization of trainer and spouse as additional sources of assessment rather than relying solely on an individual's self-report.

To test the various hypotheses aggregated from the research literature, a pretest-posttest control group design with a 3-month follow-up was formulated consisting of two treatment groups (Group I: Experiential~didactic, Group II: Didactic) and a control group (no treatment). The dependent variables were scores on the following research instruments:

1. Marital Adjustment Test (Locke and Wallace, 1959)

2. Marital Communication Inventory (Bienvenu, 1970)

3. Marriage Potential Test (Mace and Mace, 1979)

4. Relationship Change Scale (Schlein, 1971)

5. Satisfaction Change Scale (Schlein, 1971)

6. Interpersonal Relationship Rating Scale (Hipple, 1972)

Scores were recorded as couple differences obtained by subtracting the wife's score from the husband's score at each testing period.

Independent variables were group membership and experimental stage (pretest, posttest, 3-month follow-up). An analysis of covariance model with conventionalization serving as the covariate was constructed and the statistical analysis was performed utilizing the General Linear Models (GLM) procedure of the Statistical Analysis System (SAS).

The evidence accumulated in this study indicates that enrichment has no effect on participants as assessed by the dependent measurements. Future marital enrichment research should control for the conventionalization effect as well as closely scrutinize male/female sex differences. Further, future research assessments of marital enrichment should eliminate the use of the following self-report measures:

1. Marital Adjustment Test (Locke and Wallace, 1959)

2. Marital Communication Inventory (Bienvenu, 1970)

3. Satisfaction Change Scale (Schlein, 1971)

4. Relationship Change Scale (Schlein, 1971)

Finally, the underlying assumption that marital enrichment produces change should be examined carefully and perhaps, if indicated, eliminated.