Many counseling psychologists provide marital assistance to couples who have relationship problems and those who seek to enrich their relationships. The authors investigated the effects of individualized relationship assessment and feedback in relation to merely completing written questionnaires about the relationships on couples' satisfaction and commitment. Student couples (N = 48; 26 married, 15 cohabiting, 7 engaged) participated either in (a) 3 sessions of assessment feedback (n = 28) or (b) written assessment only (n = 20). Assessment-feedback couples improved more over time than did written-assessment-only couples. The authors concluded that assessment and feedback produce small positive changes in already well-functioning relationships. Those changes may account for a substantial proportion of the changes produced by relationship enrichment programs.

A descriptive statistical study was performed to assess the characteristics of youth who began committing sexual offenses in childhood. The youth in this study ranged in age from 12 to 15. They had been committed to the Virginia Department of Juvenile Justice for sexual offenses and met the criteria for residential sexual offender treatment. Three instruments were used in this study. A questionnaire was independently administered to each youth by an examiner and corroborated, when possible, by information in the youth's file. The questionnaire was supplemented by the Hare Psychopathy Scale—Revised and by information from the Risk Assessment Interviewing Protocol for Adolescent Sex Offenders. The results suggested that deviant sexual behavior may begin in early childhood, with some offenders developing patterns of offending prior to the onset of adolescence. These youth committed a median of 69.5 sexual offenses each, with each offender having a median of 16.5 victims. They used either force, threats, or violence in the large majority of their contact offenses. They predominantly came from multiproblematic families, were abused in early childhood, and were exposed to pornographic materials at a young age. The results suggest that children have the capacity to commit serious sexual offenses similar to those of older juvenile and adult offenders. The clinical implications of this study are discussed.

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This article is a content analysis of 10 prominent marital and family therapy journals during a 6-year period. Marital therapy articles were the focus of the analysis . ProliJic authors, institutions, types of articles being published, andpublication outlet were described. The aim is to survey the field and facilitate future scholarship.

Snyder and Rice (1994) comment that Shortz, Worthington, McCullough, DeVries, andMorrow (1994) failed to use sophisticated methods in their identijlcation of prolific authors, institutions, andjournals within the field of mari-tal therapy. This article is a response to Snyder and Rice. We argue that Snyder and Rice's suggested methods emphasize a diferent research question than our original question. We investigatedproductivity of authors and institutions, not im-pact of scholars on the field of marital therapy. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the results obtained from Snyder and Rice's suggested methodologies are not appreciably diferentfrom our original results.Snyder andRice (1994) argue that the methodused by Shortz, Worthington, McCullough, DeVries, and Morrow (1994) to identify prolific authors, institutions, and publication outlets in the field of marital therapy "suggests serious limitations to their conclusions" (p. 191).Snyder and Rice (1994) offer other "sophisticated methodologies . . . for identifying those sources bearing the greatest influence on a discipline" (p. 195). They offer helpful suggestions to identify influential sources within a field, and we commend them for their suggestions. CloseNext Results from the three questions indicated that the 5 journals that were considered to be the most prominent in marital therapy, and the journals to which researchers most often submitted their work in marital therapy were