Marital enrichment videos increase marital satisfaction ratings

Marriage Enrichment focuses on enhancing relationships through the teaching of interpersonal skills. Such new skills should help promote positive attitudinal changes and increase satisfaction within the relationship. This experiment used a less direct intervention than those researched previously to study the effect of short-term video enrichment on a couple's view of their marriage. Couples were assigned to one of three conditions. Two marital skills training video intervention programs aimed at increasing couple communication and satisfaction and a third video which did not attempt to teach skills were used in this experiment. Thirty married couples were assigned to groups on the basis on pre-test scores. The Dyadic Adjustment Scale (DAS) and Problem Solving Inventory (PSI) were used to assess marital satisfaction at pre-test, posttest and follow-up. A repeated-measures analysis revealed significant increases in marital satisfaction scores from pre-test to follow up for the "Learning to Live Together" video intervention. The "Your Marriage" and the "Statistics on Marriage" groups showed no significant increases.