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Dimension V: Setting—Where does it take place?
We often think of education as unmediated by its setting. That is, a curriculum specifies the relevant ideas which can be dropped into any welcoming host setting. While there may be some validity to this perspective, for at least three reasons it behooves marriage educators to think more concretely about where their craft takes place. First, there may be settings that lend themselves well to particular educational topics (e.g., workplace lunchtime seminars on balancing work and marriage; religious firesides on sexual fidelity in marriage in the modern age). Second, we may easily overlook fruitful venues for marriage education. For instance, healthcare settings are involved extensively in health education and potentially could become a fertile field for marriage education (Hawkins et al., 2002), especially when it links itself to health issues (e.g., marital relations and substance abuse recovery). Finally, the more settings in which effective marriage education occurs, the greater the proportion of individuals who will be reached. Throughout this section, we suggest the need for a more organic approach to intervention; that is, marriage education needs to weave itself naturally into the systems and sectors and professional work of civil society where opportunities exist to strengthen marriages. Of interest, this same point—that intervention should be delivered within existing institutions that already have access to the people that the programs hope to serve—has been made by Haine and her colleagues (Haine et al., 2003) in the context of a public health strategy to help divorcing families. If marriage education remains an unnatural element of these systems, or outside the systems altogether, then it will be difficult to sustain and propagate. (Note that the word sector would be a synonym for setting because generally the settings discussed in this section are also definable sectors of a complex, civil society.)
Personal/ Home. An important purpose of this framework is to shed light on areas of educational intervention that have received less attention but may have significant potential. Thus, we begin a discussion of educational settings highlighting informal, personal, home-based interventions to strengthen marriage, a category that seldom appears on the marriage education radar screen. One individual who has tried to encourage informal, personal interventions is Michelle Weiner-Davis, a prominent marriage educator and therapist. She speaks about “guerilla divorce busting” (Weiner-Davis, 2002), which is brief, informal, and personal interchanges among friends or associates aimed at educating people who are thinking out loud about divorce that there are effective ways to solve their marital problems and that marriage is worth the effort of the salvage work it sometimes requires. Similarly, Weiner-Davis and others encourage marriage educators and advocates to reinforce the value of marriage and the value of marriage education in our daily interactions with people, in beauty shops, locker rooms, hallway conversations, and the like, in effect, becoming “marriage missionaries.”
An untapped educational opportunity during this period of the marital life cycle is the chance to teach about and intentionally model for one’s children a healthy marriage. Children are exposed to failed marriages of their friends on a regular basis raising their curiosity and concern about their parents’ marriage. Parents can be effective educators of impressionable young minds about the value of marriage and their commitment to it. Pearson (2000) expressly calls for parents to be primary educators to their children about love, sexuality, commitment, and marriage. It may be especially important for unmarried or divorced single parents to reinforce for their children the value of marriage and encourage their children to make that a high priority for their lives. Marriage educators could help parents envision how to approach this task effectively. One intriguing educational possibility that emerges in midlife is parental mentoring of adult children. Parents can be a support for adult children who are marrying and beginning families. But Glenn (2002) notes that young adults today receive less monitoring and input from parents and family about courtship and marital choices. Many parents have much to offer their children as they prepare for marriage and parenting. Marriage educators could develop programs to help parents be a supportive—as opposed to intrusive—and appreciated resource to help their children establish their own healthy marriages.
The informal, spontaneous nature of these personal and family education efforts, however, makes it difficult to see them as something that fits a formal category of marriage education. We argue that marriage education can be avocational as well as vocational. The potential for these informal interactions is probably substantial, producing a learning effect out of proportion to the educational effort required. Yet the potential is substantially unrecognized at this point, and marriage educators could help teach us how to do it. We choose to give these personal, informal “interventions” a category in this framework to highlight the possibilities. We can imagine creative programs to help “lay” marriage advocates to learn techniques for micro-interventions and marriage modeling moments in the home.
Neighborhood/Community. Community settings for marriage education are a staple of the educator’s curricular diet. But before turning to a discussion of this setting, we begin at an even more proximal setting—the neighborhood. Although various changes to contemporary civic life have reduced the importance of neighborhoods for many (Putnam, 2000), for many others the neighborhood remains a salient and enriching part of their social landscape. An important point to remember is that the closer and more accessible and more familiar a setting is, the more likely it is to attract many couples, perhaps especially couples in disadvantaged circumstances who struggle with easy transportation. There are creative possibilities in organizing educational efforts on a smaller, geographically more intimate basis. For instance, topics can be tailored to specific expressed interests. It may be easier to recruit participants when the people and setting are familiar, especially if the content is clearly about enrichment and not about “fixing” (and thus openly discussing) personal problems. In addition, when couples participating together in an educational offering know each other better and are more likely to interact with each other in the future, they can become a support system for couples, reinforcing lessons learned, and even becoming stakeholders in each others’ marriages. Although the neighborhood setting for marriage education is easily overlooked, interesting possibilities reside in it.
Beyond a single neighborhood, community settings for marriage education are common. Public libraries and other civic buildings are often made available for community service classes at low or no cost, helping to hold down expenses for participants. Attaching an educational program to a civic institution, such as a YMCA or United Way, may offer the program instant credibility. Moreover, educational opportunities in a community setting may be the balanced blend of familiarity and accessibility yet relative anonymity for some individuals and couples who wish to discuss relationship challenges without worrying about their neighbors drawing conclusions or seeing their “dirty laundry.” At the same time, they benefit from listening to other participants discuss their challenges, perhaps normalizing the experience of relationship problems, which is a helpful educational process.
An additional model of community involvement in marriage education has emerged recently that holds promise. Activists in several communities have advocated the potential of a “community saturation” model. In this model, marriage activists recruit multiple sectors and institutions of a community and its leaders to get involved in various ways with marriage education efforts. They attempt to empower the community with messages and opportunities to build and sustain healthy marriages. One of the premier examples of this is “First Things First” of Chattanooga, Tennessee (http://www.firstthings.org). They work with and organize local media, businesses, religious and civic institutions, and other organizations into a sustained, community-wide effort to fight the problem of family instability and support healthy marriages. An intriguing feature of these initiatives is that they seek a cultural-level change in a locale as well as individual involvement in marriage education opportunities. That is, these initiatives seek to shift the culture from one that sees marriage as a private concern to one that sees marriage as an important component of a healthy, civic infrastructure. The educational efforts in these initiatives range in intensity from broadcasting healthy-marriage messages in the media and on public billboards to promoting weekend seminars to advertising on-going, time-intensive workshops. The Administration for Children and Families (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services) recently has been providing some financial support for how to conduct these community healthy marriage initiatives (CHMIs), and is beginning a challenging, long-term study of their effectiveness.
Religious. Religious institutions are an important thread in the fabric of any community. Although the proportion of civil weddings may be increasing (Grossman & Yoo, 2003), a significant majority of weddings are still solemnized by religious institutions. One recent national poll suggest that more than 80% of weddings are performed in religious settings (Latimer & McManus, 2003). Religious settings are probably the most frequent setting for marriage education in the United States. They are undoubtedly the location for the vast majority of premarital education and counseling that occurs in conjunction with weddings. A few religious institutions have expanded their marriage education offerings to support marriages at other points in time and in other circumstances. For instance, a handful of churches are trying to support couples when a first child is born, including providing them with marriage education opportunities. The Catholic-based ministry, “Retrouvaille,” mentioned earlier, supports an intensive educational effort to repair marriages on the verge of divorce and claims a high success rate (Rubin, 1998). Many clergy have professional training as marriage educators or therapists. Others clergy engage motivated lay individuals and couples to operate a “marriage ministry.”
Sometimes these efforts of individual faith communities grow into larger networks of support. Mike and Hariette McMannus’ “Marriage Savers” organization (http://www.marriagesavers.org) has trained hundreds of communities to organize local congregations to band together to require premarital education (with a longer engagement period to accommodate the education), and provide mentoring for newly weds. In essence, they attempt to create a religious wedding cartel in a community by committing all local religious leaders to require these steps of marrying couples before they will perform a wedding for them. An initial study of these initiatives suggests that they are effective in reducing divorce rates in a community (Birch, Weed, & Olsen, in press, 2004).
Religious settings hold particular benefits as an effective venue for marriage education. First, it is easier to invite and recruit participants into religious settings if they are already associated with the faith community. Thus, more individuals and couples will likely be reached with valuable services. Second, participants in marriage education in religious settings are likely familiar with the instructor and other individuals, or at least share much in common. And they are likely comfortable in this setting. These advantages can enrich the teaching and learning processes. Some research provides optimism that lay instructors in a religious setting can be as effective as university-trained, secular marriage educators (Stanley et al., 2001). Third, when participants end their formal participation in some marriage education program, they are more likely to maintain on-going involvement with congregants and religious leaders who also were involved and can serve as a support system, helping to maintain program effects over time. And fourth, as mentioned previously, religious settings comfortably invite the ethical and moral domain into the curricula which can provide powerful supports for learning the skills, knowledge, and virtues needed to build and sustain a healthy marriage. Clearly, a religious setting for marriage education will not be effective for all individuals, but for many who profess a faith, associate with a religious community, and who imbue marriage with deep spiritual meaning, a religious setting may be the most effective setting.
Education. Secondary and higher education are obvious, natural settings for marriage education curricula. Scholars recently examined what is being done and taught in high schools and colleges in the United States (Glenn, 1997; Mack, 2000; Pearson, 2000). These reports have critiqued the adequacy of curricula and texts commonly used, and made constructive suggestions for improvement. In the few years since those reports, there has been considerable development in secondary and higher education settings related to marriage education. Since 1998, Florida has mandated some basic marriage and relationship skills education in public high schools. Oklahoma has implemented a “Connections” curriculum in high schools that holds promise. Anecdotal evidence suggests that college classes dealing with marriage have increased in number and students over the last few years. Family life educators in the national cooperative extension service embedded in land-grant universities across the country are increasing their attention to marriage education. Parenting education has dominated their attention over the past generation, but marriage and relationship curriculum is now being developed. And it is delivered to clients often in more remote, rural, poorer, underserved locations traditionally supported by the cooperative extension system.
These educational settings present some clear benefits to marriage education. The first is numbers; marriage curricula embedded in high schools and colleges can reach a large number and substantial proportion of teens and young adults across the full range of the socioeconomic spectrum. Moreover and second, teens and young adults understandably possess a keen curiosity and appetite for reliable information to help them prepare for the critical life goal of a stable, healthy marriage. They are a generation of children born to parents who had the highest rates of divorce ever recorded; they don’t take marital success for granted, they are more squeamish about marrying, and they have less permissive attitudes than their parents about divorce. The more marriage educators can reach these eager students with solid, research-based information before they begin serious dating, cohabitation, and marital formation, the more likely they are to prevent weak relationships from forming and encourage strong relationships to grow. Unfortunately, to date there is limited, good evaluation outcome research on the effects these classes and modules have on students’ short- and long-term abilities to build and sustain healthy relationships. Meanwhile, however, marriage education efforts in high schools and colleges probably will continue to grow and hold promise for good outcomes. There is a need for talented teachers well versed in the empirical literature on healthy marriages and marriage interventions to staff these classrooms. High school teachers may be asked to cover marriage education curricula without much formal background. Accordingly, there is a serous need for good curriculum development in this area and efficient training opportunities. Marriage educators could provide this needed training.
Institutions of higher education would offer much to marriage education if they were more effective in teaching future human service professionals about the importance of healthy marriages to adults, children, and their communities, and informing them about research-based interventions to strengthen marriages in diverse situations and across the life course. As these students move into their various professions, they would be better prepared to lead and support marriage education initiatives. The Administration for Children and Families has supported university efforts to do this with a handful of some significant grants.
Healthcare. As a setting for marriage education, healthcare may have received less attention than any other discussed here. Yet the healthcare system is extensively involved in public education. Moreover, scholars have linked healthy marriages to a host of physical and emotional health advantages, and connected divorce to notable health problems for adults and children (Keilcolt-Glaser & Newton, 2001; Waite & Gallagher, 2000). Thus, it seems that the healthcare system should be a natural venue for marriage education, especially when marital issues intersect health concerns (Hawkins et al., 2002). For instance, education for couples transitioning to parenthood has been integrated into childbirth education settings (Hawkins et al., 2003; Shapiro & Gottman, 2003). Because both acute and chronic healthcare problems can impact marital relationships, health educators could give more explicit attention to both general and specific knowledge and skills needed to maintain healthy relationships when physical health fails.
Healthcare settings may be more open and conducive to specific, topical marriage education closely related to health problems than the more common general skills education. For example, substance abuse puts relationships at serious risk, yet successful recovery is enhanced by a positive, social support system (Richardson, 2001). A marriage of public health practitioners and marriage educators should be a happy and productive one. Of course, marriage education is restricted by scarce resources just as physical care is rationed. Thus, educators will want to consider where they are most likely to make significant differences. Furthermore, few healthcare educators will have extensive formal training in relationship skills and knowledge to feel comfortable in offering tailored marriage curricula. This suggests the need for creative alliances between health and marriage educators, both in the design and possibly the delivery of marriage education.
A potential strength of the healthcare setting, especially community clinics, for marriage education is that it is well suited to reach out to the racial, ethnic, and economically diverse populations that it regularly serves. Indeed, many healthcare organizations are not-for-profit and have an explicit mission of helping these diverse populations with educational outreach services.
Work/Military. The workplace will also be a profitable setting for marriage education. To date, however, the potential of a marriage education-workplace merger is largely unrealized. The rationale for educational services in the workplace to strengthen marriages is straightforward. From a micro-perspective, employee productivity is reduced directly by domestic problems and indirectly by health problems and other issues connected to marital breakdown. Hence, businesses should expect a bottom-line productivity return on their investment in marriage education. From a more macro-perspective, a stable, healthy marriage has demonstrated positive effects on men’s employment stability and earnings (Ahituv & Lerman, 2003), which is also good for the business bottom-line. And stable, higher-wage jobs are an important foundation for lower-income individuals striving to realize their aspirations of marriage. Moreover, corporations demonstrate their social responsibility by acknowledging that work has significant impact on marriage and family, and then seeking to help individuals manage this contemporary challenge.
The educational infrastructure to support workplace-based marriage education already exists, at least in larger corporations which have well developed employee assistance programs (EAPs). Many EAPs support some counseling for employees struggling with serious problems, including marriage. Preventative, educational services focused on strengthening marriages are emerging, as well, though more is needed.
The corporate setting offers some potential advantages for marriage education. First, to the extent that work organizations make education available in the workplace during the workday, and support attendance, this helps overcome the major hurdle of recruitment to preventative intervention. Similarly, the hassle of arranging childcare to participate in educational programs outside of work time, and the understandable desire to spend precious non-work time with family, are barriers to participation reduced by offering programs during regular work hours (e.g., lunchtime seminars). Second, many of these educational offerings in the workplace are underwritten or subsidized by the work organization, thus limiting or eliminating cost as another barrier to participation. Third, corporate sponsorship will lend a presumption of quality to the educational experience; when companies provide financial support for these efforts, they will inspect them (and perhaps even evaluate them) for quality and effectiveness. Fourth, the workplace may be a natural setting to address important, contemporary topics such as balancing work and personal lives, managing family finances, and training managers on how to be more accommodatating of employees’ family situations. Lastly, EAP managers are comfortable working with outside vendors, so marriage educators can be employed directly by organizations to offer their services rather than rely on corporate trainers with limited background in marriage education.
Of course, there are educational limitations to the workplace setting, as well. One significant, pragmatic challenge will be the difficulty of including both spouses. Most couples do not work for the same employer. While companies could be accommodating and encourage employee spouses to participate, it may be logistically hard to do. Much marriage education assumes delivery to a couple, not an individual. Educators will need to accommodate this difference or find ways to involve the non-employee spouses without them actually present. They also may want to emphasize unilateral change that strengthens marriages rather than mutually learned and coached skills. These potential problems will challenge marriage educators to develop new ways of working with individuals to strengthen couple relationships.
Another potential limitation of the workplace setting may be making educational offerings available to lower-wage workers (and part-time employees) whose schedules may be less flexible. Marriage educators in corporate settings should attend to this basic justice issue. However, to the extent that employees from across the socioeconomic spectrum participate together in marriage education offerings, the curriculum will need to be sensitive to the different experiences and needs of diverse groups. This can be a pedagogical challenge for educators requiring careful program design and implementation.
The military (including reserve units) consumes a significant proportion of the U.S. workforce these days, so it is also a defensible setting for marriage education. In fact, marriage education in the armed forces is considerably advanced compared to the private workforce. The rationale for marriage education in the armed forces is similar to that of the corporate world. That is, marital problems impinge on force readiness, as well as saps budgetary resources. Furthermore, military service places significant stresses on the marriages of military personnel, so it is harder to retain these valuable human resources for extended military service (Stanley et al., 2004).
As with other educational settings, the military has both advantages and challenges. One set of advantages has to do with its ability to reach individuals and couples who would benefit from marriage education. An infrastructure for education exists in family support services attached to major military bases. Many professionals in these settings are already developing and offering marriage education to the military personnel they serve. For instance, a version of the PREP program suitable for the military setting is seeing active duty at several Army bases, embedded in a broader curriculum of health and well-being for military personnel and families. Military chaplains are the primary coordinators and trainers for these programs. Some of these chaplains also have professional training in the human behavioral sciences. Hence, there is an existing infrastructure available generally for military personnel to support marriage education. Just as important, there are some available resources to back up these support services. Consequently, the programs are more likely to be sustainable. Also, they are usually available at no cost to military personnel. Again, this lowers barriers to program participation. In addition, both the resources and the mind-set to evaluate the effectiveness of these marriage education programs generally exist within the military setting. Early evaluations of the Army PREP program have shown promise for strengthening relationships (Stanley et al., 2004).
The military setting also has its challenges for marriage educators. There a number of unique circumstances to military service that likely weaken the applicability of standard, off-the-shelf marriage education programs. For instance, long deployments and spousal separations common to military service place exceptional demands on marital relationships. Marriage educators need to address not just generic marriage skills and knowledge, but also specific skills and knowledge on how to cope with and manage these unique challenges. Similarly, military service involving combat places strains on marital relationships. Research indicates that veterans who have seen combat have a significantly higher than predicted rate of marital disruption (Wilson et al., 2002). In addition, high mobility among military personnel can leave couples more isolated from the informal social support available to other couples. Marriage educators may need to emphasize these issues and find ways to help military personnel compensate for this risk factor to building and maintaining healthy marriages.
Mass Media. Mass media in our society educates as well as entertains. Furthermore, we live in a media saturated society, and mass media have substantial power to shape our beliefs and behaviors (Hornik, 2002; Putnam, 2000). Marriage education in the media ranges from brief public awareness campaigns to information-filled Websites to extensive documentaries. Media can be focused on specific groups (e.g., young Latinos in urban settings) or broadcast to huge, general audiences. Some marriage educators already use the reach and power of mass media directly to teach important knowledge and skills. Other marriage educators build web-based, marriage resource sites for their communities, an inexpensive way to begin a community initiative (see http://www.OCmarriage.org). Still others stretch their educational influence by building helpful, on-going relationships with reporters and producers. Diane Sollee, director of the Coalition for Marriage, Family, and Couples Education in Washington DC (http://www.smartmarriages.com), has played a strategic role by becoming the central media contact for reporters and producers working on stories related to marriage education.
The mass media setting for marriage education may be particularly well suited to reach young people who consume large amounts of media (Roberts, 2000). Moreover, younger people seem more comfortable and adept at computer-mediated information technology. Of course, one of the primary advantages of mass media for marriage education is its potential to reach large numbers of individuals at relatively low costs. The potential for creating cultural-level change is one of the most exciting possibilities of media-based marriage education. These efforts take time, resources, and great skill. But there is ample evidence of how media helps shape our attitudes and modify our behavior for the better (Hornik, 2002). Mass media can quickly pump up the volume of the marriage education message in a community or society.
Nevertheless, there are clear limits to this educational setting as well. Higher-dosage, sustained offerings will be difficult to accommodate and few in number in this medium. Instead, mass media lends itself to lower doses of marriage education with bottom-line messages rather than individualized and nuanced instruction. Initial production costs can be a daunting barrier for marriage educators to overcome. And media consumers demand that programming be new and current, so on-going attention to the message is required. In addition, marriage educators in this setting will need to understand the challenges of capturing and holding the attention of a remote-control generation, and adapt their programming accordingly.
The specialized knowledge and connections required for success in the communications industry suggest that marriage educators, with a few exceptions, will be most effective building positive working and consulting relationships with reporters and producers rather than striking out on their own, although effective Websites are relatively easy to build and maintain. In addition, marriage educators need to partner with trained public relations professionals who understand how to attract and enlist mass media. The possibilities for creative integration of marriage education in mass media are virtually limitless. Marriage educators must not overlook the potential of mass media as a setting for helping individuals and couples gain the knowledge and skills needed to build and sustain healthy marriages.
Government/Public Services. Marriage is a public institution as well as a private relationship. A strong institution supports governmental goals, both broad ones to promote the general welfare of its citizens and specific objectives to assist more disadvantaged individuals (Browning, 2003; Gallagher, 2004). Thus, it should not surprise us when government also gets involved in marriage education efforts. Strictly speaking, government is more involved as a catalyst for marriage education in other settings than a setting in itself. But government has a potentially valuable role in promoting the involvement of its citizens in marriage education that can help them form and sustain healthy relationships. For example, under current TANF policy, several states are using a small portion of their federal funds to subsidize marriage education efforts, especially for disadvantaged couples. Arizona helps pay for premarital education programs for lower-income couples. Oklahoma has made a major commitment to building a state-wide network of marriage educators formally trained in the PREP program to make this validated intervention available to as many interested, individuals and couples as possible. It has paid special attention to reaching more disadvantaged groups. Other states, such as Utah, are providing helpful, free information booklets to marrying couples (Governor’s Commission on Marriage & Utah Department of Workforce Services, 2002). A handful of state legislatures have reduced significantly the cost of a marriage license if couples take a premarital education program.
Government policy is also encouraging social service agencies, including child and family support and income security entities that serve at-risk populations, to explore the potential of marriage education for their clients. Federal demonstration projects are identifying agencies, both private and public, and including an array of state and community entities, that have an interest in helping their clients form and sustain healthier relationships as a tool for reducing poverty, dependence on government subsidies, and domestic violence. One invaluable consequence of government support of marriage education efforts is that it encourages and stretches marriage educators to serve more economically disadvantaged individuals and couples who have not been a primary target in the past. In turn, marriage educators working to serve disadvantaged couples are necessarily adapting their curricula to be more ecologically sensitive to the unique challenges these couples experience to a healthy marriage. Of course, a critical way that government encourages marriage education is by providing funding support. Programs that serve the poor are always stretched to meet the demand; they do not have discretionary funds to support new programs. Another valuable consequence of government involvement in marriage education is its dedication to evaluation. The federal government has committed funding to several long-term, marriage education demonstration and evaluation studies over the next decade. These and other state-funded evaluation studies will investigate how effective interventions can be that include educational components and other services to strengthen marriages.
Marriage educators working under the auspices of government support will undoubtedly experience frustrations. Bureaucratic entanglements and requirements are ubiquitous in this setting. Government imposes multiple constraints on those organizations who receive funding. This can be discouraging, but a fortitude to work within these constraints will open up possibilities for reaching underserved populations that otherwise would be difficult to reach.
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