Questions are answered in relationship to the Parrotts’ work in marriage education and in relationship to a variety of sociocultural factors concerning the condition and treatment of marriage issues in contemporary society. The Parrotts’ SYMBIS approach to pre-marital, neomarital and early marriage education is discussed. In addition, recommendations are made for marital interventions to local […]

Does divorce typically make adults happier than staying in an unhappy marriage? Many Americans assume so. This study represents, to the best of our knowledge, the first serious effort to investigate this assumption empirically. Using the National Survey of Families and Households (a nationally representative survey), we looked at all spouses (645 spouses out of […]

This article presents findings about problematic issues from a national study of couples married five years or less. It argues that the top 10 issues identified as problematic suggest key content areas for premarital education and makes suggestions for both program development and existing program evaluation. The top three issues reported by this sample are […]

The National Marriage Projects’s list of ten myths of divorce including social, emotional and financial consequences.

Prior studies on alcohol use and marital functioning have largely overlooked the possibility that these variables operate differently in Latino and European American couples. The present study addresses this gap by examining the role of alcohol-related problems and anger as correlates of marital satisfaction among newlywed monoethnic Latino couples (n = 13), biethnic Latino couples […]

The proportion of births that occur outside of marriage in the United States has climbed over the past 30 years, reaching 37 percent in 2005. This pattern is a cause for concern because children born to unmarried mothers fare worse, on average, than do their peers who are born to married parents. The context of […]

Communication Smarts focuses exclusively on the communications parts of PREP, which have beenadapted especially for use with teens. The unit offers a concise and coherent package of communicationand conflict management skills. These activity-based lessons make teens aware of the patterns that canwreck relationships and then teach teens a set of skills for reducing, stopping, and […]

Marriage promotion has taken a prominent position on the public policy agenda as a solution for economic hardship and “”undesirable”” social behavior. The most extensive legislation that promotes marriage as a way to combat poverty is the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996. Given the higher rate of single parenthood, and the […]

Marriage and divorce have typically been viewed asthe province of state government. It is state law thatdetermines the conditions of entry into and exit out of marriage, and establishes the legal obligations and rights of spouses toward one another. State and local court decisions interpret and help enforce these laws. Over the past century, changes […]

The recent literature on the effects of welfare on marriage and fertility includes studiesemploying a wide variety of methodologies and data sets and covering different time periods. A majorityof the studies show that welfare has a significantly negative effect on marriage or positive effect onfertility rather than none at all, and thus the current consensus […]