Helping Clients Forgive: An Empirical Guide for Resolving Anger and Restoring Hope

This article presents reliability and validity data for the 15-item ENRICH (evaluation and nurturing relationship issues, communication and happiness) Marital Satisfaction (EMS) Scale. The scale was found to be reliable and to have strong correlations with other measures of marital satisfaction and moderate relationships with measures of family satisfaction and consideration of divorce. The EMS Scale offers an important alternative to researchers who require a brief but, nevertheless, valid and reliable measure of marital quality. It provides a means to obtain both dyadic and individual satisfaction scores. Ten of the scale’s items survey 10 domains of marital quality. The other 5 items compose a marital conventionalization scale to correct for the tendency to endorse unrealistically positive descriptions of the marriage. National norms based on 2,112 couples are presented for the EMS Scale.

ENRICH Marital Satisfaction Scale: A brief research and clinical tool.

A randomized clinical trial compared the effects of traditional behavioral couple therapy (TBCT) and integrative behavioral couple therapy (IBCT) on 134 seriously and chronically distressed married couples, stratified into moderately and severely distressed groups. Couples in IBCT made steady improvements in satisfaction throughout the course of treatment, whereas TBCT couples improved more quickly than IBCT couples early in treatment but then, in contrast to the IBCT group, plateaued later in treatment. Both treatments produced similar levels of clinically significant improvement by the end of treatment (71% of IBCT couples and 59% of TBCT couples were reliably improved or recovered on the Dyadic Adjustment Scale; G. B. Spanier, 1976). Measures of communication also showed improvement for both groups. Measures of individual functioning improved as marital satisfaction improved.

Traditional versus integrative behavioral couple therapy for significantly and chronically distressed married couples.

Sabin examines the self-report measures used to assess various constructs of concern to marital research with specific attention to selected indicators of marital satisfaction marital adjustment and marital quality. Indicators of marital intimacy and marital complaints are also reviewed. Attention is also directed to the measures of concepts linked more directly to marital stability including measures of commitment relationship alternatives and potential for marital dissolution. The author emphasizes several points upon concluding his review. First while the adjustment quality measures are intended to provide a broad profile of marital relationships they are psychometrically flawed in several ways. Their most fundamental problem has to do with the threats to validity that result from the blending of units and objects of analyses within a single measure. It is not reasonable to scale different units and objects of analyses as if they are comparable phenomena because there is no way of knowing what the resulting score actually represents. More than likely what accounts for the more objective characteristics of a relationship are confounded by the more subjective impressions of the relationship particularly when these items of information are simultaneously solicited. Finally when a marital adjustment scale is used it becomes virtually impossible to assess related concepts independently. These problems lead to the conclusion that the use of measures of adjustment should be curtailed and that satisfaction quality be used to refer only to the subjective evaluations that a person makes of his or her marital relationship. There is also an obvious need to further develop measures of important and diverse marital concepts; developers of future measures must attend to their conceptual operational and psychometric properties. It is imperative as well that measures be subjected to critical and multiple tests of their validity before their widespread adoption and use be advocated. It is also essential that all researchers develop an appreciation for the central role of measurement in the research process. The understanding of social phenomena when that understanding is derived from survey research is predicated on the quality of the measures employed by researchers.

Measurement issues in marital research: a review and critique of contemporary survey instruments.

This study examined the relationship between alcohol consumption and marital aggression in a community sample (N = 272) assessed in a longitudinal study at premarriage and at 6, 18, and 30 months of marriage. Participants completed selfreport measures of alcohol problems and total alcohol consumption, aggressive personality style, marital aggression, marital adjustment, and divorce potential. Husbands' alcohol problems were associated with serious aggression at premarriage and at 6 months. Alcohol use interacted with aggressive personality traits in predicting aggression at 18 months. Husbands' premarital aggression, but not alcohol problems, was predictive of wives' future steps toward divorce and lower marital adjustment. Results are discussed in relation to the marital mediational model of alcohol and aggression in marriage and to the need to account for developmental changes in the relation between alcohol and aggression during the early years of marriage

Alcohol and aggressive personality styles: Potentiators of serious physical aggression against wives?

The Marital Status Inventory (MSI), a measure of divorce potential was given to couples in six independent samples. Scores from the five clinical sites and one marital enrichment sample (N = 241 couples) were used to provide adequate reliability, discriminant validity and predictive validity data. Compound probability for the five clinical sites supports the contention that, overall, wives’ are more distressed than their husbands. The MSI was also able to identify couples who later divorced. However, the Guttman properties of the MSI, previously identified, were not replicated. Clinical implications of the higher wives’ scores for prediction of divorce and marital therapy are discussed. Marital and family therapists often find it of practical use to predict the divorce potential of their clients. Knowledge that a client system is at risk for divorce may affect the style, pacing and type of therapy used. For example, divorce adjustment may be the therapy of choice as opposed to marital therapy. In response to the need for a means of assessing thoughts and actions toward divorce, the Marital Status Inventory (MSI) was developed (Weiss & Cerreto, 1980). The MSI was thought to be a Guttman-type measure of progression along a continuum, with no thoughts of divorce as one extreme and filing for or being divorced as the other. Fourteen questions are presented in true-false format and inquire into specific thoughts and behaviors believed to represent progressive steps toward divorce. Thus, scores range from 0 to 14, with higher scores thought to be representative of greater marital instability. Preliminary studies by Weiss and Cerreto (1980) and Crane and Mead (1980) offer some initial validity, reliability, and normative data for the instrument. Guttman analysis on the MSI was done with 134 married students and 24 couples participating in a marital therapy research project (Weiss & Cerreto, 1980). They found

Predicting divorce at marital therapy intake: wives' distress and the marital status inventory†

A survey of alcoholism counselors from a state and a national sample was conducted as a preliminary study to be used in the planning of a larger survey. The survey attempted to gather qualitative and quantitative data with which to test observations made about the recovering counselor in the alcoholism literature. Recovering counselors were contrasted with non-alcoholic counselors in terms of demographic characteristics and attitudes toward alcoholism counseling as a profession and the issue of relapse in recovering counselors. The results found that despite significant differences in demographic characteristics, recovering and nonalcoholic counselors tended to have very similar attitudes toward issues involving alcoholism treatment and relapse.

Comparison of Recovering and Non-Alcoholic Alcoholism Counselors: A survey

Suicide attempters admitted to a general hospital psychiatric ward completed questionnaires to elicit information following their suicide attempt. Compared to normal controls who had never attempted suicide, suicide attempters were significantly more hopeless, depressed, and hostile. The suicide attempts seemed to occur in response to stress. A crisis intervention model was suggested as the most appropriate way of managing these patients.

Young suicide attempters compared with a control group: psychological, affective, and attitudinal variables.

Psychiatry clerkships traditionally place students on a single site for the duration of the rotation. This article describes an eight-week training model in which students rotate through two different sites during their clerkship. On one “track,” students spend four weeks each on an inpatient mental health unit and consultation-liaison service. On the other “track,” students spend four weeks each on an inpatient chemical dependency unit and an outpatient psychiatry service. The rationale for this split rotation is described and the “tracks” are compared via students’ performance on clinical evaluations, oral exams, and a written exam (NBME Subtest in Clinical Psychiatry). Based on these outcome variables, both tracks appear to provide comparable and effective clinical training for junior clerks.

Duane Armstrong

Papers

Predicting divorce at marital therapy intake: wives' distress and the marital status inventory†

Comparison of Recovering and Non-Alcoholic Alcoholism Counselors: A survey

Young suicide attempters compared with a control group: psychological, affective, and attitudinal variables.

The Psychiatry Clerkship: Use of the “Split” Rotation in Clinical Training