Promoting healthy and supportive couple relationships through sustainable, evidence-based program delivery

Maintaining a healthy and supportive couple relationship can be a trying endeavor for many couples, with national estimates suggesting as many as one-third of marriages are distressed, a statistic that may be a conservative estimate at present given the challenges many couples are facing in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. The presence and prevalence of this distress is nontrivial, as unmitigated relationship distress forecasts a variety of negative outcomes for individuals, their families, and the broader community.

In response to the prevalence of relationship distress across the country and its negative effect on adults and children, a myriad of relationship education and intervention programs have been developed. Unfortunately, the effectiveness of many of these programs, nearly all of which have employed in-person, group-based programming, has been limited. Emerging findings, however, suggest that certain brief, web-based interventions can provide an efficient and highly effective means of delivering programming to distressed couples.

Dr. Allen Barton, Assistant Professor & Extension Specialist in the Department of Human Development & Family Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, is addressing this limitation by evaluating a novel, sustainable approach for providing programming to help-seeking couples through the Cooperative Extension System.

The program is designed to implement and evaluate a leading online intervention (‘ePREP’) with the addition of remote coaching provided through the Cooperative Extension system. The ePREP program is built on decades of research and represents one of the most scientifically based and scientifically proven programs for relationship enhancement.

To assess outcomes from this hybrid approach to programming, Dr. Barton is collecting participant data via an online survey assessment. These assessments occur at baseline (pre‑test), shortly after program completion (~two months post baseline), and long-term follow-up (six months post baseline). Constructs being collected from these surveys include relationship satisfaction, relationship confidence, destructive communication, individuals’ psychological distress, and demographic information.

The longitudinal nature of assessment with three waves spanning six months will permit examination of within-individual rates of change as well as more lasting effects of the program.

Through strengthening this key relationship within the larger family system, this project is designed to improve the lives and relationships among adults, children, and the communities in which they live. Further, the project’s novel hybrid approach to program dissemination is expected to have national implications for providing sustainable, evidence-based programming designed to improve human relationships.