This fact sheet outlines reasons why supporting and integrating healthy marriage education skills should matter to safety-net service providers.
This paper explores effects of the Supporting Healthy Marriage (SHM) program for six subgroups of couples in the study. SHM’s impacts were generally consistent across these subgroups, though some evidence suggests that couples whose marriages were more distressed at study entry may have benefited more from SHM. Overview on MDRC Website
The Behavioral Interventions to Advance Self-Sufficiency (BIAS) project is the first major opportunity to use a behavioral economics lens to look at programs that serve poor and vulnerable people in the United States. Working with the Texas Office of the Attorney General´s Child Support Division, the BIAS team explored ways to increase the number of […]
This report provides detailed summaries of major research investments by OPRE’s Division of Family Strengthening (DFS) along with brief overviews of past projects. The featured projects cover topics that include strengthening relationships within families, supporting fatherhood, nurturing children through their families, reducing teen pregnancy, and supporting youth in their transition to adulthood. The report also […]
Supporting Healthy Marriage (SHM) was a yearlong voluntary marriage education program to help strengthen couples' relationships. SHM had small sustained positive effects on marital quality more than a year after the program ended but did not achieve its objectives of leading more couples to stay together or improving children’s well-being. MDRC SHM Overview Link
The Measuring Couple Relationships agreement transferred funds from the Administration for Children and Families (ACF) to the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) to support activities of the NICHD Family and Child Well-Being Network, through the Network’s grant at Child Trends (HD30930/Moore), to review the state of the art in measuring couple […]
In The Forever Initiative, Hawkins calls for more state-directed public support for a series of educational efforts to help individuals and couples form healthy relationships and enduring marriages. He outlines an integrated set of feasible and affordable educational initiatives across the early life course, beginning in youth, continuing in early adulthood, engagement, and through the […]
This brief describes the adaptations and refinements undertaken by nine selected grantees to make their services more culturally responsive. The adaptations included addressing issues of language, diversity, racism, and immigration, and incorporating cultural constructs like familismo, confianza, personalismo, and respeto. These adaptations were made to improve the recruitment, retention, overall participation, and effectiveness of the […]
The Building Strong Families (BSF) evaluation assessed the impacts of eight programs offering a similar model of healthy marriage and relationship skills and support services to interested low-income unmarried parents around the time of the birth of a child. While many unmarried parents live together when their children are born, their relationships are often tenuous […]
This report summarizes four studies completed between the years 2007 – 2009 that were designed to assess marriage and relationship education recruitment challenges from various perspectives. The report concludes with marketing strategies from the Spears School of Business at Oklahoma State University.