Media portrayals of stepfamilies influence societal views of stepfamilies and individuals’ expectations for remarriage and stepfamily life. This study examines portrayals of stepfamilies in films released in 1990 through 2003. Using content analysis to understand how stepfamilies are portrayed and to identify film clips appropriate for use in remarriage education programs, we found that stepfamilies […]

Like most marriage and relationship education curricula, the program for couples wehave the most working knowledge of grew out of experiences with mostly middle incomecouples (The Prevention and Relationship Enhancement Program: PREP). Further, anoverwhelming amount of research in the field of marriage and family that was not conducted bydemographers has used middle income samples. However, […]

Marriage has become a hot topic in Washington policy circles, stimulated in large part by new Congressional proposals to promote “”healthy”” marriages as part of the reauthorization of welfare. A vigorous debate is underway about the role of government in strengthening marriage. This brief, the first in a new series on Couples and Marriage Research […]

Relationship education is widely available to couples and is intended to reduce the prevalence of relationship distress, divorce, and the associated personal and social costs. To realize the potential benefits of couple relationship education, it needs to be evidence-based, offered in ways that attract couples at high-risk for relationship problems, and focused on factors that […]

Even before policymakers in Washington began their current welfare-related debate on the role of government in promoting marriage, a number of states and communities had created polices and programs to reduce divorce and strengthen marriage. This brief, the second in a new series from CLASP on Couples and Marriage Policy, describes the surprisingly wide range […]

This article discusses the outcome and process research on couple therapy and integrates the articles special section “”Couples and Couple Therapy”” into the discussion. All tested couple treatments show statistically significant effects relative to control groups, but there are no reliable differences between different theoretical models. Moreover, all tested approaches leave substantial numbers of couples […]

The association between religiosity and marital outcome has been repeatedly demonstrated, but a complete understanding of this relationship is hindered by limitations of theory and method. The purpose of the current study was to test 3 explanatory models by assessing 2 samples of newlywed couples. Findings indicated that religiosity was associated with attitudes toward divorce, […]

Implicit in this debate are assumptions about the nature of relationships between unmarried parents, the extent of economic resources, and the prevalence of domestic violence and related risk factors. This brief uses data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study to examine the characteristics of unmarried couples and, more specifically, to determine what proportion […]

Although much has been learned from cross-sectional research on marriage, an understanding of how marriages develop, succeed, and fail is best achieved with longitudinal data. In view of growing interest in longitudinal research on marriage, the authors reviewed and evaluated the literature on how the quality and stability of marriages change over time. First, prevailing […]