Characteristics of Individuals Associated with Involvement in Different Types of Marriage Preparation Interventions

As evidence of the benefits of marriage preparation continues to mount, so does the importance of investigating the characteristics of the interventions that are most helpful and for whom. Currently, more emphasis is paid to assessing program outcomes in marriage education than to systematically determining the characteristics of the audience (DeMaria, 2005). Understanding the characteristics of a target audience is critical to the development of targeted programs (Hawkins, Carroll, Doherty, & Willoughby, 2004), marketing the programs to those who need them, and ensuring that the resulting programs are relevant and based on identified needs of the audience (Duncan & Goddard, 2011). Recent research has shed additional light on the individual, couple, and contextual characteristics of the audience predictive of involvement in marriage preparation in general, from an ecosystemic-developmental perspective (Duncan, Holman, & Yang, 2007). Recent marriage intervention scholarship has emphasized the importance of tailoring interventions to the needs of clientele (Larson & Halford, 2011) rather than relying on a one-size-fits-all approach. Carroll and Doherty (2003) suggested that a variety of "education formats may be equally effective" (p. 115). Duncan, Childs, and Larson (2010) verified that a variety of interventions receiving attention in the published literature (i.e., for-credit college classes, community workshops, premarital counseling, and self-directed approaches; see Duncan et al., 2010, for full description) are seen by marriage preparation participants as helpful and change producing.These studies have set the stage for further inquiry into what factors precipitate selection of different types of marriage preparation interventions. Currently, we know little about the individual, couple, and context characteristics of participants who select which interventions and how helpful and change producing they are for what kind of clientele. For example, are persons with certain individual characteristics more likely to select one intervention over another? Is there a better fit of interventions, in terms of perceived (for marketing and recruitment) and actual (in terms of outcomes) helpfulness and benefit, for persons with select individual personality and emotional health characteristics? This study focuses on the first question and seeks to uncover characteristics of individuals associated with the selection of specific marriage preparation interventions. Findings from this study should be helpful to marriage preparation practitioners seeking to attract a wider range of participation and create interventions more closely tailored to the needs of participants.Conceptual FrameworkThe conceptual framework guiding this study is based on the summary of over 50 years of research on premarital predictors of marital quality authored by Busby, Holman, and Taniguchi (2001). These authors suggested that this research can best be understood from an ecosystemic developmental perspective. This perspective suggests that the premarital predictors of later marital quality can be organized into a model comprising individual contexts, couple contexts, family background contexts, and sociocultural contexts. Although numerous contexts could be assessed and used to predict involvement in various forms of marriage preparation, this model identifies the most important contexts for premarital and marital relationships (Holman, 2001). The focus of this study is on the individual context. The individual context comprises inherent individual characteristics (e.g., age, gender), personality traits and emotional health (e.g.,, kindness, neuroticism), and beliefs and attitudes (e.g.,, beliefs about marriage and family life, gender roles). These characteristics can present assets or liabilities to a relationship. For example, though the personal assets of flexibility and kindness predict marital satisfaction, unmanaged depression and anxiety predict marital troubles (Busby et al. …