There have been many shifts in the terrain of romantic partnership in Western culture over the last 50 years: developments of technologies of connection, the legalization of same-sex marriages, distant extended families, a tripled divorced rate for those age 65+, and an increase in interracial partnerships, interreligious marriages, romantic relationship involving remarriage, and cohabitation (Geiger & Livingston, 2018). The implications of such changes call us to reconsider who constitutes a “couple” and what it means to engage in “coupledom.” Moreover, many of these processes have placed an increasing primacy on the companionate relationship. As Finkel (2017) notes in his book, The-All-or-Nothing Marriage, “In contrast to our predecessors, who looked to our marriage to help them survive, we look to our marriage to meet our needs for passion and intimacy and to facilitate voyages of self-discovery and personal growth” (p. 13). Despite these demands, many individuals are not able to put forth the time and energy required to make partnerships (both marital and otherwise) work at such a high level of functioning, as more people are involved in intensive parenting and participate in the paid labor force (Amato, Booth, Johnson, & Rogers, 2007).
With such major changes taking place within the love landscape, the need to support the range and diversity of dyads (or triads+) and family systems becomes ever more important. Coupling and all its associated processes, particularly child rearing, are fundamental and legitimate public health issues. Accumulated research has become virtually indisputable; the well-being of our partnering relationships is intimately intertwined with every other aspect of our overall well-being (Jaremka, Glaser, Malarkey, & Kiecolt-Glaser, 2013). It is, therefore, necessary that relationship health and wellness is a domain supported by efficient and time-effective interventions constructed to prevent and address relational ills.
The efficacy of assessment-based interventions with couples has been documented with a similarly wide and varied scope of contexts (Fentz & Trillingsgaard, 2016), and have proven to be efficacious in their ability to help couples quickly understand and address their problem areas (Halford et al., 2010), increase awareness of strengths and challenges (Larson, Vatter, Galbraith, Holman, & Stahmann, 2007), improve partner communication, and prevent future relationship problems (Snyder, Cozzi, Grich, & Luebbert, 2001). Assessment-based interventions are able to meet both distressed and non-distressed dyads at whatever level of engagement is most appropriate, including: high-level partnership enhancement, relationship education and skill building, targeted domains of desired improvement, and more intensive processes of traditional couples therapy. Texts on couples therapy present a consensus that assessment functions as a quick and efficient means of collecting substantial information and data that can assist with clarifying key issues, and the range of influence these concerns have on the couples’ relationship (Sperry, 2012). Assessments can also help identify individual, interpersonal, and environmental factors that may affect intervention outcomes (Williams, Edwards, Patterson, & Chamow, 2011), determine which mode of treatment seems most appropriate for the presenting couple (i.e., primary, secondary, or tertiary), and assist with creating shared goals for all involved with the therapeutic process. Evaluations used with dyads can also serve an intervention function by actively inviting couples into the process at hand by validating concerns, providing feedback, and engendering hope through shared perspective-taking and divergent thinking (Sperry, 2012a).
Lavee and Avisar’s (2006) study shows that the majority of marital therapists in the U.S. do not use any kind of structured assessment method when beginning an intervention with new clients. Instead, most practitioners endorsed that they depend primarily on clinical interviews. Such data corroborates with previous findings in that clinicians tend to rely, primarily, on their own judgment of couple relationships (Bray, 1995). While clinical judgment is part and parcel of the therapeutic process, there are many well-documented types of inferential bias to which any and all therapists are susceptible: availability and representativeness heuristics, fundamental attribution error, anchoring, prior knowledge, labeling, confirmatory hypothesis testing, and reconstructive memory. In order to avoid such bias pitfalls, the use of empirically validated assessments can be beneficial in improving the accuracy and, therefore, success of couples treatment.
Beyond the use of assessments within a dyadic context are the methodologies and philosophies driving such interventions. Models such as Collaborative Assessment (Finn, 2007), Therapeutic Assessment (Fischer, 2000), and Psychological Assessment as a Therapeutic Intervention (Coates et al., 2016) look to facilitate processes through which clinicians continually invite individuals to reflect on why and how they experience themselves, others, and the larger world as they do. Done within the frame of a romantic relationship, such process-rich evaluation allows partners to engage in a “phenomenological knowing,” an opportunity to come to terms with the “various dimensions, inner tensions, contradictions, and potentialities” (p. 130) that constitute both themselves and their significant other (Bradford, 2010). This kind of an approach to couples assessment encourages the sharing of meaningful reactions to and feedback about assessment results (both positive and negative). The efficacy of such models continues to be demonstrated concerning the improvement in mental health, symptomology, and treatment accessibility, alterations in attitudes essential for client change, increased desired change within the therapeutic context, and the generation of a more contextual view of the client, relationships, and presenting concerns (Hanson & Poston, 2011).
Below are brief summaries of just three of the many available couples-based assessments as a jumping off point for further research:
- The Marital Satisfaction Inventory-Revised (MSI-R; Snyder, 1997) serves the purpose of broadly assessing a couple ’s romantic relationship, married or otherwise. Each partner ’s results are displayed on a single, comparative profile that provides a cutoff frame in which there is no distress, moderate distress, and / or severe distress concerning each of the 13 subscales. Several advantages of using this assessment include: voluminous research supporting the evaluation, availability in Spanish, adaptability to a wide range of settings and theories, and the inclusion of a scale to screen for intimate partner violence.
- The Beliefs, Events, and Values Inventory (BEVI; Shealy, 2015) is a web-based, analytic tool that examines, from a mixed methods approach, how and why individuals come to see themselves, others, and the larger world as they do across multiple processes of human functioning (e.g., transformational learning, being in relationships, personal growth, emotional/attributional processes, pursuit of life goals, etc.) via three experiential reflection items and 17 construct scales. Several advantages of using this evaluation include: complete assessment of each individual within the dyad, client-friendly, visual profiles, and ability to invite meaningful dialogue about difficult topics.
- The Sentence Completion Series-Marriage (SCS-M; Brown & Unger, 1992) is a semi-projective method of gathering information associated with current client concerns and specific areas of marital distress with 50 sentence stems and eight different content areas. Several advantages of using this measurement include: acceptability to clients, allowance of more emotionally engaged and less guarded production of information, and opportunity to utilize interactive methods of reviewing identified themes.
References
Amato, P.R., Booth, A., Johnson, D.R., & Rogers, S.J. (2007). Alone together: How marriage in America is changing. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Bradford, G.K. (2010). Fundamental flaws of the DSM: Re-envisioning diagnosis. Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 50, 335-350.
Bray, J.H. (1995). Family assessment: Current issues in evaluation of families. Family Relations, 44, 469-477.
Brown, L.H. & Unger, M.A. (1992). Sentence Completion Series - Marriage (SCS-M). Lutz, FL: Psychological Assessment Resources, Inc.
Coates, M., Hanson, W., Samuel, D.B., Webster, M., & Cozen, J. (2016). The Beliefs, Events, and Values Inventory (BEVI): Psychological assessment implications and applications. In C.N. Shealy (Ed.), Making sense of beliefs and values: Theory, research, and practice (1st ed.) (pp. 373-405). New York, NY: Springer Publishing Company.
Fentz, H.N., & Trillingsgaard, T. (2016). Checking-up on couples – A meta-analysis of the effect of assessment and feedback on marital functioning and individual mental health in couples. Journal of Marital and Family Therapy, 42(1), 31-50.
Finkel, E.J. (2017). The all-or-nothing marriage: How the best marriages work. New York, NY: Dutton.
Finn, S.E. (2007). In our clients ’ shoes: Theory and techniques of therapeutic assessment. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Fischer, C.T. (2000) Collaborative, individualized assessment. Journal of Personality Assessment, 74(1), 2-14.
Geiger, A., & Livingston, G. (2018, February 13). 8 facts about love and marriage in America. Retrieved from https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/02/13/8-facts-about-love-and-marriage/opens in new window.
Halford, W.K., Wilson, K., Watson, B., Verner, T., Larson, J., Busby, D., …Holman, T. (2010). Couple relationship education at home: Does skill training enhance relationship assessment and feedback? Journal of Family Psychology, 24, 188-196.
Hanson, W.E., & Poston, J.M. (2001). Building confidence in psychological assessment as a therapeutic intervention: An empirically based reply to Lilienfeld, Garb, and Wood (2011). Psychological Assessment, 23(4), 1056-1062.
Jaremka, L.M., Glaser, R., Malarkey, W.B., & Kiecolt-Glaser, J.K. (2013). Marital distress prospectively predicts poorer cellular immune function. Psychoneuroendocrinology, 38(11), 2713-2719.
Larson, J.H., Vatter, R.S., Galbraith, R.C., Holman, T., & Stahmann, R.F. (2007). The Relationship Evaluation (RELATE) with therapist-assisted interpretation: Short-term effects on premarital relationships. Journal of Marital and Family Therapy, 33, 364-374.
Lavee, Y, & Avisar, Y. (2006). Use of standardized assessment instruments in couples therapy: The role of attitudes and professional factors. Journal of Marital and Family Therapy, 32(2), 233-244.
Shealy, C.N. (2015). The Beliefs, Events, and Values Inventory (BEVI): Overview, implications, and guidelines [Test manual]. Staunton, VA: Author.
Snyder, D. K. (1997). Manual for the Marital Satisfaction Inventory – Revised. Los Angeles: Western Psychological Services.
Snyder, D.K., Cozzi, J.J., Grinch, J., & Luebbert, M.C. (2001). The tapestry of couple therapy: Interweaving theory, assessment, and intervention. In S.H. McDaniel, D.D. Lusterman, & C. Philpot (Eds.), A casebook for integrating family therapy: An ecosystemic approach. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
Sperry, L. (2012). Family assessment: An overview. In L. Sperry (Ed.), Family assessment: Contemporary and cutting-edge strategies (2nd ed.) (pp. 1-16). New York, NY: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group.
Williams, L., Edwards, T.M., Patterson, J., & Chamow, L. (2011). Essential assessment skills for couple and family therapists. New York: The Guilford Press.
