Expanding the Reach and Effectiveness of Marital Interventions

Despite the efficacy of empirically-based marital interventions, only approximately 31 percent of cou-ples seek premarital education. Moreover, couples who attend pre-marital education under-represent some categories of couples known to be at highest risk for marital distress or divorce. Additionally, married couples often wait years after serious problems develop to seek marital therapy and only 37 percent of couples seek marital therapy at all before filing for divorce. Finally, if and when couples seek help for their marriage, the help they receive is generally not empirically based. In this paper, I suggest three avenues to address these limitations. 1) The reach of current interventions can be expanded by adapting the way they are advertised, by expand-ing third-party payment, and by involving governments, employers, and others in the referral process. 2) Interventions that couples already seek (e.g., religious-based premarital education and existing marital therapy, relationship-oriented books, and self-administered assessments) should be examined to determine their effectiveness. 3) Additionally, the development of new empirically-based marital interventions that can be delivered to one or both partners individually or in a self-help format (such as television, DVDs, or over the Inter-net) could greatly expand the reach of marital education and treatment