Supporting Healthy Marriage

Project

Overview

STATUS: Current

Basics

Issue: Families with Children

Focus Area: Family Relationships, Two-Generation Programs, Mental Health/Substance Abuse

Population: Families, Low-Income Populations

Focus Population: Two-Parent Families, Fathers

Locations: Florida, Kansas, New York, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Texas, Washington

Intervention: Counseling/Advising, Marriage Education, Parenting Skills Programs

Project Overview

The Supporting Healthy Marriage project is the first large-scale, multisite, multiyear, rigorous test of marriage education programs for low-income married couples. Supported by the Administration for Children and Families within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the project is motivated by research that indicates that married adults and children raised by both parents in stable, low-conflict households do better on a host of outcomes. Low-income couples face greater challenges to building and maintaining healthy marriages, however, and their families are consequently less likely to experience their benefits. While an extensive body of evidence on strengthening couple relationships exists, this research consists primarily of small-scale studies of typically short-term programs for middle-class couples.

Supporting Healthy Marriage is part of a larger HHS research agenda to study the effectiveness of efforts to strengthen family relationships. Other research projects include the Building Strong Families evaluation of programs targeted to low-income unwed couples beginning around the time of their child’s birth, and the Community Healthy Marriage Initiative Evaluation, which is evaluating community saturation approaches for strengthening healthy marriage.

FEATURED CONTENT

Report

Final Implementation Findings from the Supporting Healthy Marriage Evaluation
Eight programs, in various settings, successfully implemented a voluntary package of relationship skills services for low-income married couples with children, engaging a diverse group of couples who participated for eight months on average. A companion report finds that the programs produced a pattern of small, positive effects on couples’ relationships after 12 months.
- Overview
- Full PDF
Report

Early Impacts from the Supporting Healthy Marriage Evaluation
This report, which presents 12-month impact results from a demonstration designed to strengthen marriages among low-income married couples with children, shows that the program produced a consistent pattern of small, positive effects on multiple aspects of couples’ relationships, including measures of relationship quality, psychological and physical abuse, and adult individual psychological distress.
- Overview
- Full PDF
Working Paper

Married and Poor

Basic Characteristics of Economically Disadvantaged Couples in the U.S.
Using recent surveys and published reports, this working paper assembles a portrait of the attitudes and behaviors of disadvantaged married couples. It gathers and assesses descriptive statistics on the formation and stability, characteristics, and quality of marriages in the low-income population in the U.S. We welcome discussion and comments on this working paper.
- Overview
- Full PDF

Agenda, Scope, <br> & Goals

Agenda, Scope, and Goals

Supporting Healthy Marriage is led by MDRC in collaboration with Abt Associates, Child Trends, Optimal Solutions Group, and Public Strategies Inc., along with leading experts on marriage, marital education programs, and services for low-income families. The project is designed to inform program operators and policymakers of the most effective ways to help couples strengthen and maintain healthy marital relationships. In particular, the project will measure the effectiveness of programs that provide instruction and support to improve relationship skills. Programs also include links to services that may help low-income couples address strains on their relationships, such as problems with employment, health, or housing insecurity. In addition, they include extended marriage education activities that reinforce the relationship skills taught in the program. All programs provide for safe disclosure of domestic violence and access to the appropriate services in the community for families in which domestic violence is disclosed.

With its target group of low-income married couples, the Supporting Healthy Marriage evaluation is expected to contribute unique lessons about the effectiveness of marriage and relationship skills interventions for this population:

Since the program focuses on married rather than unmarried couples, the participants are particularly likely to be committed to each other and to the success of the relationship.

Perhaps reflecting this commitment, local SHM programs have had high participation rates.

Research (mostly with middle-class couples) has shown that that relationship skills education can have a positive effect on married couples’ satisfaction with their relationships. The relationship skills curricula used in SHM were adapted from existing curricula for married couples to use appropriate teaching approaches and content for lower-income married couples.

Supporting Healthy Marriage is a ten-year project. Its primary goal is to provide reliable information about the implementation and impacts of marriage education programs for low-income couples through a rigorous research design. To accomplish this, the project is evaluating marriage education models that were modified to meet the needs of a diverse and economically disadvantaged population. Each local program is serving large numbers of participants, providing greater statistical power and the ability to examine the effects of these programs for different types of families. Another important goal of the project is to build a firm knowledge base for practitioners about how these programs can be effectively implemented at a relatively large scale.

Design, Sites, & <br> Data Sources

Design, Sites, and Data Sources

The Supporting Healthy Marriage project has several stages. In the study design and program development stage, research team members and consultants, in conjunction with the Administration for Children and Families (ACF), decided upon the type of intervention to be tested and the specific target groups for the project. The goal was to place priority on program models that will help build knowledge about what works for low-income couples and that local program operators expressed an interest in implementing at a large scale.

After the initial planning stage, the SHM research team provided technical assistance to eight Supporting Healthy Marriage local programs. These programs completed the pilot phase and were selected by ACF to move into the full-scale evaluation phase of the demonstration. This technical assistance included working with program managers to train staff, providing Web-based guidance on program implementation, and developing management information systems to help track services. The lead agencies of the eight Supporting Healthy Marriage local programs were:

University of Central Florida in Orlando, Florida
Catholic Charities, Wichita, Kansas
University Behavioral Associates, Bronx, New York
Public Strategies, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma
Community Prevention Partnership, Reading, Pennsylvania
Health and Human Services Commission, Austin, Texas
Becoming Parents Program, Seattle, Washington
Center for Human Services, Shoreline, Washington

After being selected into the evaluation, Supporting Healthy Marriage local programs randomly assigned interested couples to program and control groups. Since this process started, the research team has been collecting data on both the implementation and the impacts of the program. The team is currently in the process of analyzing the data and writing reports and other publications presenting the findings from the first wave of follow-up data (collected about 12 months after couples entered the programs). A second wave of follow-up data is being collected roughly 30 months after couples entered the programs. The major data sources for the research include data on families’ characteristics when they enter the study, follow-up surveys and direct assessment of outcomes for couples and their children, program records documenting couples’ participation in program activities, observation of program activities, and interviews with program staff.

Funders & <br />Partners

Funders

U.S. Department of Health and Human Services

Partners

MDRC Staff

JoAnn Hsueh
Project Director
Senior Associate, Family Well-Being and Children’s Development
Hsueh is currently one of the lead investigators on two random assignment evaluations: (1) the Supporting Healthy Marriage (SHM) Project, an evaluation of marriage education program targeting low-income, racially and ethnically diverse married couples and (2) an evaluation of an early childhood,
More
Virginia Knox
Director, Family Well-Being and Child Development Policy Area
Knox brings 25 years of experience to the study and evaluation of social programs, with special expertise in how supports for low-income parents — including child support, financial incentives, and services to strengthen family relationships — affect families and children.
More
Desiree Principe Alderson
Research Associate, Family Well-Being and Children’s Development Policy Area
Alderson is currently the data manager for the Supporting Healthy Marriage Project (SHM), an evaluation of marriage education programs targeting low-income, racially and ethnically diverse married couples.
More
Barbara S. Goldman
Vice President, Director of Deployment and Accountability
As Vice President for Accountability and Deployment, Barbara Goldman is part of MDRC’s corporate management team, responsible for assessing staffing needs and leading MDRC’s quality assurance and risk management program covering all of MDRC’s projects.
More
Chrishana M. Lloyd
Senior Associate, Family Well-Being and Children’s Development
Lloyd is qualitative methodologist. She leads the implementation research and serves as the project manager for Foundations of Learning, an evaluation of an early childhood intervention designed to improve teachers’ capacity to manage challenging behaviors in the classroom.
More
Amy Lowenstein
Research Associate, Family Well-Being and Children’s Development Policy Area
Lowenstein joined MDRC as a Research Associate in 2011.
More
Erika Lundquist
Research Associate, Family Well-Being and Children’s Development
Lundquist has several years of experience in evaluating social programs and policies.
More
Charles Michalopoulos
Chief Economist
Michalopoulos is an expert on experimental and nonexperimental statistical methods and on social policies for more disadvantaged groups.
More
Jocelyn Page
Research Associate, Family Well-Being and Children’s Development
Page has over ten years of experience in public policy research and project management. She currently serves as the resource manager for two of MDRC’s largest demonstration and evaluation projects: the Employment Retention and Advancement project and the Supporting Healthy Marriage project.
More
Marilyn Price
Senior Associate, Family Well-Being and Child Development Policy Area
Price takes a lead role in site selection, development, field research, and technical assistance for many of MDRC’s large-scale studies of adolescents and their academic progress. She has been the senior site specialist in both the Career Academies and the Project Transition evaluations.
More
Sharon Rowser
Vice President, Deputy Director, Policy Research and Evaluation Department
Rowser is Vice President, Deputy Director of the Policy Research and Evaluation Department, and Director of MDRC’s Oakland office.
More
Electra Small
Senior Associate, Family Well-Being and Child Development Policy Area
As a technical manager, Small takes a lead role in every aspect of a project’s technical work, including data acquisition, security, verification, cleaning, imputation, and analyses.
More
Helen Lee
Senior Associate, Family Well-Being and Child Development Policy Area
Lee’s research focuses on understanding the social and economic determinants of health, and the role of public policy in improving population health and reducing disparities.
More
Lyndsay McDonough
Research Associate, Family Well-Being and Child Development Policy Area
McDonough is a data manager who has worked on several projects at MDRC: Supporting Healthy Marriage (SHM) is an evaluation of marriage education programs targeting low-income, racially and ethnically diverse married couples; Head Start CARES (Classroom-based Approaches and Resources for Emotion a
More

FEATURED PUBLICATION

Final Implementation Findings from the Supporting Healthy Marriage Evaluation

August, 2012

Authors: Jennifer Miller, Daniel Gubits, Desiree Principe Alderson, Virginia Knox

Eight programs, in various settings, successfully implemented a voluntary package of relationship skills services for low-income married couples with children, engaging a diverse group of couples who participated for eight months on average. A companion report finds that the programs produced a pattern of small, positive effects on couples’ relationships after 12 months.