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 employed in-person, group-based programming, has been limited. However emerging findings 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 in the Department of Human Development and Family Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, addressed this limitation by evaluating a novel, sustainable approach for providing programming to help-seeking couples through the Cooperative Extension System.

Dr. Barton enrolled 184 couples in the program, a web-based intervention with the addition of remote coaching, through the Cooperative Extension system. The program is built on decades of research and represents one of the most scientifically based and scientifically proven programs for relationship enhancement.

Results showed significant improvements in all three examined areas of relationship domains, namely greater relationship satisfaction, higher relationship confidence, and lower levels of communication conflict. Significant improvements were also observed for individuals reporting decreases in psychological distress. With respect to long-term improvements (i.e., baseline to six-month follow-up), a similar pattern of results appeared. For long-term improvements, individuals continued to report significant improvements in all three areas of relationship domains as well as decreases in psychological distress.

Additionally, Dr. Barton endeavored to develop a sustainable, scalable infrastructure that would allow for ongoing dissemination of the program beyond the funding period. To aid this effort, he trained new Extension Educators in the Midwestern region to be able to serve as program coaches and integrate this coaching into Educators’ ongoing plan of work.  He then developed and disseminated a suite of state-specific recruitment materials.

Program dissemination has successfully continued in a self-sufficient manner since the end of project funding. Additional couples have successfully enrolled in the program and educators from Extension systems in four different Midwestern states are actively serving as program coaches and aiding program recruitment and advertising efforts. With this infrastructure in place, project enrollment is now open to couples throughout the nation.

Lastly, during the project funding period, the training series for new coaches was updated to provide increased ability and scalability. This new training programming has proven successful, with new Educators trained as coaches using this updated training series after the end of project funding, and more Educators are scheduled to get trained during summer 2025.