Is skills training necessary for the primary prevention of marital distress and dissolution? A 3-year experimental study of three interventions.

Abstract

These findings highlight the potential value of cost-effective interventions such as RA, cast doubt on the unique benefits of skill-based interventions for primary prevention of relationship dysfunction, and raise the possibility that skill-based interventions may inadvertently sensitize couples to skill deficits in their relationships.

Evaluating and Refining the Construct of Sexual Quality With Item Response Theory: Development of the Quality of Sex Inventory

“…More specifically, the analyses presented in Table 4 were consistent with recent treatment findings (e.g., Rogge et al, 2013) suggesting that unidimensional measures of global sentiment can potentially obscure meaningful treatment results revealed by bi-dimensional measures like the QSI. Thus, although researchers could choose to include a single subscale of the QSI in their studies, we would recommend that they include both sexual satisfaction and dissatisfaction as distinct outcomes in their studies, modeling them separately so as to gain a more comprehensive understanding of couples' sexual quality.…”

“…In fact, these results began to suggest that collapsing positive and negative evaluations into a single dimension (asiscurrentpracticewiththeexistingscales)mightobscuremeaningful longitudinal results. Consistent with this, a recent study examining relationship enhancing interventions in a sample of 174 couples followed over the first 3 years of marriage demonstrated significant outcome differences across intervention groups for positive but not negative relationship evaluations, and those differences were obscured when a unidimensional scale was used to model relationship quality (Rogge et al, 2013). The current results suggested that the use of unidimensional scales like the ISS, YSSS, or PSSI could potentially be obscuring results in a similar manner.…”

“…This assumes that individuals are either satisfied or dissatisfied with their sex lives, rather than allowing for the possibility that individuals may be ambivalent (potentially feeling both sexually satisfied and dissatisfied at the same time) or indifferent (feeling low levels of both sexual satisfaction and dissatisfaction) about their sexual relationships with their partners. Recent work on global evaluations of romantic relationship quality has suggested that relationship satisfaction and relationship dissatisfaction can effectively be treated as distinct dimensions (e.g., Fincham & Rogge, 2010;Mattson, Rogge, Johnson, Davidson, & Fincham, 2012) and that disentangling those dimensions might uncover distinct treatment effects obscured by unidimensional scales (e.g., Rogge, Cobb, Lawrence, Johnson, & Bradbury, 2013). To build on this work, the current study used factor analyses in a diverse item pool to examine the possibility that sexual dissatisfaction might represent a distinct dimension.…”

Protecting relationships from stress

“…We argue that eliminating stress at its source may hold unique advantages, in part because direct efforts to intervene with couples might heighten awareness of relationship weaknesses [15]. Efforts to reduce stress with interventions that operate 'below the radar' -that is, largely outside of couple awareness --can promote relationship well-being while incurring fewer costs for the couples themselves.…”

Relationship education for military couples: the development and randomised controlled trial of Couple CARE in Uniform

“…In the absence of a no intervention control it is not possible to conclude that the controlled reading program had a positive effect. However, Rogge, Cobb, Lawrence, Johnson, and Bradbury (2013) found that couples who watched and discussed movies about intimate relationships reaped similar benefits to couples receiving skill-based RE. There is considerable debate in the literature around whether active skills training such as that included in…”