Professionals generally believe that couples who choose to attend marriage education programs are not as distressed as are clinical couples and that distressed couples are not good candidates for marriage education. We examined these assumptions in 129 married couples who enrolled in a PAIRS, Practical Application of Intimate Relationship Skills (Gordon, 1994), marriage education course. […]
In 1972, feminist scholar Jessie Bernard authored a classic book, The Future of Marriage. In 2003, the National Council on Family Relations (NCFR) conference in Vancouver revisited this theme. As conference chair, I picked this theme for three reasons. First, given the importance of marriage, a conference focusing on this topic was long overdue; the […]
This guide is designed to help healthy marriage (HM) and responsible fatherhood (RF) programs work with domestic violence (DV) programs experts in their own communities, help practitioners in these fields understand the benefits of working together and consider some specific ways of doing so, and raise the awareness of public officials, advocates, and community leaders […]
Who would have guessed that the institution of marriage was in so much trouble? In the midst of the battle over same-sex marriage, which seems to be all about declaring marriage something worth fighting for, everyone else seems to be worrying about whether the family as a social institution, and marriage along with it, are […]
Marriage is being discussed on the national social agenda. This is a controversial subject with many positive outcomes associated with healthy marriages at one end of the spectrum and unhealthy marriages that can include domestic violence at the other end. The controversy also encompasses the question of government’s role in the intimate decision of whether […]
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 […]
Part I: An Advocate’s Guide for all Immigrant Women Victims of Domestic Violence.–Part II: For Battered Women not yet Prepared to Leave the Relationship.–Part III: For Battered Women Who are Currently Leaving an Abusive Relationship or Who Have Already Left. (Author abstract, modified)
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 […]
A simple model of fatherhood and marriage choice implies that stricter child support enforcement will tend to reduce nonmarital childbearing by raising the costs of fatherhood. We investigate this hypothesis by examining nonmarital childbearing during 1980-1993, a period when child support policy and enforcement underwent enormous changes. We use a sample of women from the […]