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A Comparison of the Effects of Highly Structured, Partially Structured, and Non-Structured Human Relations Training for Married Couples on the Dependent Variables of Communication, Marital Adjustment, and Personal Adjustment (open access)

A Comparison of the Effects of Highly Structured, Partially Structured, and Non-Structured Human Relations Training for Married Couples on the Dependent Variables of Communication, Marital Adjustment, and Personal Adjustment

This study compared the effects of three treatment approaches to training married couples in communication skills on the dependent variables of marital communication, marital adjustment, and the personality characteristics of extraversion/introversion and stability/instability. The initial focus of the study was to determine whether any of the treatment programs--a highly structured (T3), a partially structured (T1 ) or a non-structured (T 2) program -- were superior to any other or to the control group in affecting change in the participants level of communication or in their marital or personal adjustment. The structured programs were derived from the human relations training programs of Carkhuff as well as Rappaport and Harrell's Behavior Exchange Model of conjoint marriage counseling, and adapted for use in a short-term group training procedure. The unstructured training utilized the client-centered approach to couple counseling as developed by Rogers. The number of activities and amount of time spent on each exercise was more rigidly set in the highly structured training than in the partially structured approach. The twenty-four training programs were conducted by two doctoral students in counseling over a seven-week period. A pretest/ post-test, control group experimental design was employed in the research; the data were analyzed using the …
Date: May 1975
Creator: McIntosh, Diane Merse
System: The UNT Digital Library