Effects of relationship education on couple flourishing.

Abstract

Couple Relationship Education (RE) is a brief intervention that aims to enhance the relationships of currently satisfied couples. Meta-analyses of RE evaluations find small effect size gains in relationship satisfaction, which might reflect that RE is a weak intervention. Alternatively, the demonstrated insensitivity of current measures of relationship satisfaction to variance at the upper end of the relationship quality range might underestimate change that is occurring. Recently developed measures of couple flourishing are designed to more sensitively measure high levels of relationship quality. The present study examined changes after RE in 21 couples on two measures of couple flourishing and one measure of couple satisfaction. RE was associated with a significant but small effect size improvement in satisfaction and a significant medium-to-large effect size improvement in couple flourishing. While replication is needed, current findings suggest that measure insensitivity might have led to understatement of the true of effects of RE, at least in some populations.