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A Comprehensive Framework for Marriage Education
Nearly all individuals in our society, regardless of their socioeconomic location or cultural background, place a high value on marriage, both as a personal relationship and as a social institution (National Marriage Project, 1999; Roper Center for Public Opinion Research, 1998). And a generation of research documents the general value of healthy marriage to adults, children, and the communities in which they reside (Ribar, 2003; Waite & Gallagher, 2000). Yet marriage also seems like a fragile institution; high divorce and non-marital childbearing rates are primary witnesses that testify to this vulnerability. However, in a progressive, “how-to” society such as the United States, we usually take problems as a cause for action rather than a reason for resignation. Thus, it should surprise no one that the beginnings of a marriage movement have emerged in the U.S. over the last decade. Its goal is to improve child and adult well-being by strengthening marriages for the challenges they face at the beginning of a new century (Gallagher, 2000).
A critical part of this proto-movement to strengthen marriage has been a wide array of educational initiatives. Currently, however, there is no map or conceptual framework of marriage education that helps practitioners and observers see all this work in perspective. This monograph is an attempt to produce a map, or framework, depicted in Figure 1, of the marriage education world and an initial guidebook for traveling in it. Our hope is that this framework will provide marriage educators with a set of concepts and terms that help them better understand and practice their craft. In addition, we hope this framework will help practitioners discover the un-seen or un-tried educational possibilities within the field which we believe will be essential to strengthening the institution of marriage. Our goal is to offer a framework that helps marriage educators think more systematically, thoroughly, and creatively about intervention efforts and opportunities to strengthen marriage. We draw attention to the curricular dimensions of content, intensity, method, timing, setting, target, and delivery, and their implications for marriage education. Our discussion throughout the paper points out the potential value of developing marriage education with greater specificity in content, timing, and target. It notes that we have much to learn about effective marriage education for disadvantaged individuals and couples who potentially have the most to benefit from educational initiatives. And it calls for more organic intervention that embeds marriage education in diverse institutional settings with access to couples, and that spreads the burden of marriage education beyond those who readily identify themselves as marriage educators to professionals in other settings who can graft marriage education into their on-going work. In the end, we address the challenge of taking marriage education beyond a valuable helping profession and even an expanding educational service integrated into the everyday work of human service professions to a vibrant social movement capable of sustaining a marriage renaissance.
Contextualizing Marriage Education: Categories of Intervention
The primary focus of this framework is educational intervention, especially primary, preventative intervention (Coie, Watt, West, & Hawkins, 1993). Nevertheless, education is only one kind of intervention. It is helpful to think about other forms of intervention to strengthen marriage in order to place marriage education in a broader context. Two other forms of intervention are therapy and policy. In this framework, it is tempting to argue that education is primary intervention, or preventative; that clinical efforts are secondary intervention, or remedial; and that policy initiatives are supportive intervention, as they attempt to promote healthy marriages. These distinctions, however, are not pure. Clinicians do individualized educational intervention, for instance, in the context of premarital counseling, in which couples explore the strengths and weaknesses they will bring into a marriage. They also occasionally prescribe group psychoeducation as part of a clinical treatment plan (DeMaria, 2003). Policy interventions can promote educational opportunities, such as providing vouchers for low-income couples to take a marriage-preparation seminar, or incenting marriage education for distressed couples for whom divorce is a proximal possibility. Distinguishing between education as prevention, therapy as remediation, and policy as support is only valid as a broad generalization.
Clinical. Therapy to help distressed couples overcome serious problems that immediately threaten their marriages is a critical form of intervention. Recent meta-analytic studies have documented the efficacy of couple therapy (Bray & Jouriles, 1995). Individual therapy can also help solve problems that may threaten marriages. Clinical intervention recognizes the reality of acute marital distress and addresses the need for intensive, personalized, professional assistance. It also recognizes the need for mental health services to deal with individual problems that inhibit healthy relationships (e.g., addiction, anger). A strong clinical community is essential to a complete intervention system to sustain healthy marriages. Nevertheless, it is easy for the drama of clinical intervention to overshadow the equivalent need for more prosaic, educational intervention. Preventative education may reduce the acute need for clinical services. Furthermore, couples who have participated in educational interventions may seek clinical help sooner when challenging problems arise (Stanley, 2001).
Policy. Marriages exist in a social and cultural ecology that support or work against them. Both directly and indirectly, public policy is crafted to support—or unintentionally weaken—marriage. Because healthy marriages provide communities and society valuable benefits, marriage is a defensible target of public policy (Haskins & Sawhill, 2003; Horn, 2003; Ooms, 1998; Parke, 2003). This assertion has been recognized increasingly over the past five years as several analytic streams have converged. First, federally funded research has shown that low-income, unmarried couples are usually together at the birth of their child and often desire marriage, but only a small fraction attains that goal (Bendheim-Thoman Center for Research on Child Wellbeing, 2002; 2003a; 2003b). In addition, several primary objectives in welfare reform that passed during the Clinton administration highlighted the need for policy to promote marriage and stable, two-parent families. Welfare analysts have been exploring the connections between marriage and economic independence (Ribar, 2003). Scholars and social policy makers have also expressed concern that the institution of marriage appears to remain beyond the grasp of many economically disadvantaged groups (Gallagher, 2004; Horn, 2003) who have lower rates of marital formation and higher rates of marital dissolution. Reacting to these insights, policy makers are just beginning to explore ways that government can do a better job of supporting couples’ desires to marry and create a stable family situation for their children. One part of those efforts is providing educational services to disadvantaged couples, showing again that intervention categories will overlap.
Legislative action intended to strengthen marriage is one form of policy intervention. For example, numerous states have considered reforming divorce law to give greater substance to the social pillar of marital permanence that has been crumbling over the past century. Three states have passed “covenant marriage” legislation which allows couples to choose a more demanding set of laws to govern the entrance into and potential exit from marriage (Hawkins et al., 2002). A handful of states have passed legislation that provides couples with incentives (in the form of reduced fees on the marriage license) to take marriage preparation classes before marrying. Other states are considering imposing a brief waiting period for marriage licenses hoping to discourage impulsive marriages which are at much greater risk of divorce. Of course, it will continue to be important for research to evaluate the efficacy of these and other legislative interventions. There is potential, we believe, for well designed legislative intervention to impact a large number of couples in positive ways. Moreover, legislation, because it can impact so many lives, and because it garners considerable media attention, also has the ability to shift the cultural conversation about marriage in ways that may better support healthy relationships. (For a more comprehensive report on government policy to strengthen marriage, see Gardnier et al., 2002; Ooms, Bouchet, & Parke, 2004).
Government policy indirectly impacts marriage in numerous ways, as well, and the total indirect effect may even exceed the effect of direct efforts to build and sustain healthy marriages. Thus, in the same way that law makers are required to evaluate the impact of new legislation on environmental goals, it is important that policy makers wanting to support marriage cast their analytic eyes across a broad set of legal and social policies to discern its effects on the institution of marriage (Bogenschneider, 2002). For instance, public policy is keenly concerned with the human and social capital that undergirds social and economic well-being, which in turn positively affect marriage. The ability to provide for a family is a critical foundation for marriage, and policy efforts to promote employment may have positive effects on the ability to form and sustain marital permanence. Economic and social policy that helps reduce the financial stresses individuals experience in their everyday lives will support healthy, stable marriages. Educational attainment also has been consistently correlated with better marital outcomes. Policy is legitimately concerned about such things as addiction, abuse, mental health problems, and incarceration which undermine people’s abilities to form and sustain healthy marriages. Some policy analysts (Ooms, 2002a; Parke, 2003) use the term “marriage-plus” to refer to marriage intervention that explicitly recognizes the need for policies to increase “marriageability” regardless of couples’ marital status. Public efforts to address these problems are essential to an agenda to strengthen marriage. Moreover, sometimes policy can unintentionally provide disincentives for couples who want to marry. For instance, some welfare regulations economically penalize the choice to marry (Rector, Pardue, & Noyes, 2003). Thus, policy intervention that eliminates marriage disincentives in sensible ways may be valuable to the overall effort of strengthening marriage.
Social policy intervention is not limited to government, of course. Important policy in the corporate world, healthcare, media, and elsewhere can have significant impact on marriage. Workplace policies that explicitly recognize, respect, and support employees’ family bonds strengthen marriage (Bogenschneider, 2002; Browning, 2003). Similarly, corporations that offer health benefits to as many employees as possible enhances the economic role of providing, thereby strengthening marriage. Even media policy that, for instance, limits or constrains the delivery of sexually explicit material may provide an indirect support for marriage. Clearly, public policy to support couples’ efforts to build and sustain a healthy marriage includes more than governmental efforts. If educational efforts to strengthen marriage must swim upstream against heavy institutional and cultural currents, they will not go as far. Hence, broad levels of public policy intervention are a needed to compliment clinical and educational intervention to strengthen marriage.
Preliminary Caveats and Comments
The framework we present here centers on educational intervention. Before beginning to elaborate on the framework, however, a handful of caveats and general comments are in order.
First, we acknowledge our positive bias toward marriage education. Although there is reason for early optimism (Gallagher, 2004), there is a need for more data to confirm the general efficacy of marriage education as an intervention tool to help a full range of couples build and sustain healthy marriages. This is especially true regarding disadvantaged and minority couples. While we wait for those data to accumulate, we know enough to continue the work marriage educators have begun. We are optimistic that the cumulative efforts of marriage researchers will eventually yield sufficient evidence of the value of marriage education. Accordingly, although we will critique shortcomings and gaps, we adopt a positive tone in our discussion of marriage education.
Second, we use the term marriage education in this framework. Some would argue that the broader term relationship education would be more appropriate because it more comfortably encompasses education for couples who are in a relationship, but not married. While there is a role for relationship education that is independent of any specific relationship status, we employ the term marriage education for specific reasons. One reason is that we find the term relationship education too reductionistic in the context of marriage; that is, it suggests that marriage is only about a private, romantic relationship between two people. But marriage is more in the view of many scholars (Browning, 2003; Nock, 2002; Waite, 2002). It has institutional features that are potentially an important part of educational curricula. In addition, people bring attitudes and virtues to marriage that seem to dangle rather unattached to the rubric of relationship education. Accordingly, we prefer the term marriage education. We use the term marriage education, however, with a life course perspective that refers to education that covers many issues of importance to youth, uncoupled individuals, and unmarried couples in different circumstances.
Furthermore, and third, we employ a broad meaning for the term marriage education rather than limit the meaning to more formal, programmatic efforts. We draw from the 19th century philosopher Henry Adams, who wrote that “the profoundest lessons are not the lessons of reason; they are sudden strains that permanently warp the mind” (Adams, 1918). A correlate of this assertion is that learning that leads to action may be as likely to come from less formal educational settings as formal ones. Conceivably, “mind-warping” moments about forming and sustaining healthy marriages could occur across the full range of educational offerings, from a media campaign's attention-grabbing message on a billboard to a 120-classroom-hours workshop led by trained facilitators. Insight that leads to positive action is the goal of educational intervention. Delivering a potent idea that “clicks and sticks” is just as valid as more formal efforts that strive for full absorption and retention of a whole curriculum. We should be careful about force-fitting insight into formal educational formats. This is not to diminish the value of programmatic education, but only to enlarge the potential for less formal and intensive education to help couples gain the skills, knowledge, and virtues that sustain healthy marriages.
A fourth concern we have is that the framework is easily interpreted as representing distinct, non-overlapping dimensions and neat separations of categories within the dimensions. Just as the three general types of interventions just discussed overlap, so do the educational dimensions. The framework uses the heuristic of a model to guide thinking, but the user will need to exercise caution because the framework inevitably will suggest more categorical independence and structure in marriage education than actually exists or would be beneficial.
Finally, we do not emphasize description of current educational efforts in the framework. We provide some illustrative examples, but we stress possibilities rather than a taxonomy. Marriage educators have made considerable progress in some areas, but the field is wide open in other areas.
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