Using Videotaped Feedback During Intervention With Married Couples: A Qualitative Assessment

Abstract: Sixteen married couples volunteered to participate in a 6-week empathy training program. Ten of the 16 couples observed and made comments about their taped interaction at the end of the program. Individuals watched the tape of their own interaction at the follow-up and were asked several qualitative questions, including what they noticed about themselves. The five themes that emerged in the comments individuals made after watching themselves on videotape included surprised by self, discomfort watching the tape, increased self-awareness of emotions, observed patterns of interaction, and nondefensive self-disclosure. We discuss the potential utility of the videotape methodology for marriage educators and interventionists. Key Words: marriage enrichment, qualitative research. Numerous "active listening" type programs have been developed to improve the quality of marriage relationships such as, Guerney's Relationship Enhancement Program (Guerney, 1977; Guerney & Maxson, 1990), Long's Empathy Training Program (Long & Angera, 1999), Markman's Prevention and Relationship Enhancement Program (Markman, Stanley, & Blumberg, 1994), and Miller's Couple Communication Training (Miller, Miller, Nunally, & Wackman, 1991). Active listening programs typically seek to encourage clear and direct communication, increase the expression of active listening, assist couples in paraphrasing the message of a partner, and teach effective conflict resolution strategies (Markman et al., 1994). From a behavioral point of view, active listening is how empathy is operationalized across a variety of perspectives (Jacobson & Margolin, 1979). These active listening-type programs have been shown to help maintain stable, satisfying marriages within nonclinical samples of couples (Davis & Oathout, 1987; Long, 1993; Long & Andrews, 1990). One marriage active listening program demonstrated an increase in expressions of empathy with one's partner, and empathic change was positively related to relationship satisfaction at a 6-month follow-up (Angera & Long, 2006; Long & Angera, 1999). The Importance of Empathy in Marriage Education In the broadest sense, empathy refers to the cognitive and affective responsivity of one person to another. The affective component typically denotes taking on the feelings of another, whereas the cognitive component sometimes called perspective taking is defined as cognitively understanding the point of view of another (Davis, 1983; Long & Andrews, 1990). This study's marriage education program was a structured, psychoeducational group for couples who experienced desire to increase their expression of empathy with their partner. Similar to other family education programs, the information was developed to be easy to understand, free of formal terminology, and relevant to specific romantic relationships (Brems, Baldwin, & Baxter, 1993). The goal of the 6-week, 12-hr program was to teach individuals the micro level skills that are the components of empathic behavior and encourage couples to practice those skills within the context of their relationships. In the course of the six 2-hr sessions, six components of empathy were described and modeled for participants including empathie sensitivity, empathie listening, suspension of one's own thoughts and feelings, empathie listening, empathie communication, and empathie checking with a partner through paraphrasing. These programmatic ideas were developed after a thorough review of many different empathy programs designed to teach empathy to a wide group of individuals, including high school and college students (Hatcher et al., 1994), family members (Guerney, 1988), socially maladjusted girls (Chalmers & Townsend, 1990), parents (Brems et al., 1993), and hospital nurses (Herbek & Yammarion, 1990). For program participants, empathy was defined as an accurate understanding of the situation of a partner, putting oneself in his/her shoes, seeing the world from the partner's point of view, and sensitively communicating that understanding to a partner such that one's partner feels understood. …