ASSERTIVE BEHAVIOR TRAINING FOR RECENTLY MARRIED COUPLES (COMMUNICATION, EARLY YEARS MARRIAGE, ENRICHMENT, FAMILY LIFE EDUCATION, GENDER DIFFERENCES-ASSERTIVENESS).

Description

As couples embark on the complex relationship of marriage, they frequently lack preparative education for the issues of the early years of marriage. This study examined the effects of participation in an assertive behavior program on recently married couples' levels of assertion, aggression, and submission in the marital relationship, levels of assertive behavior in a variety of interpersonal contexts, and levels of marital communication. In addition, effects of gender of spouse on levels of the various behaviors were determined. Assertive behavior was viewed as similar to marital quality concepts: the marital communication concepts of clarity and openness and the marital power concepts of egalitarian distribution of power in decision making and noncoercive interaction. A field experiment with a posttest-only control group design was utilized to test two null hypotheses. Forty couples, obtained primarily from marriage records in a Southwestern metroplex community, met the following criteria: 18 years of age or older, high school graduation or equivalence, no previous assertive training, not currently participating in psychological or psychiatric therapies, and married two years or less. Each couple was randomly assigned to experimental or control group. Twenty-one experimental couples and 19 control couples completed a personal information form, the Assertiveness Scale for Couples, ASC (DeGiovanni, 1979), the Adult Self Expression Scale, ASES (Gay, 1975), and the Marital Communication Inventory, MCI (Bienvenu, 1970). Experimental couples received a two-session program which incorporated previously validated cognitive and behavioral approaches to promoting assertive behavior. Null hypotheses were tested with multivariate analyses of variance with repeated measures over gender of spouse. A null hypothesis of no difference in dependent variables based on program participation was accepted. Alternative explanations for this finding focused on use of techniques only from assertive training literature, variation in couples' participation, insufficient time between program and measurement of dependent variables, and limitations in instrumentation. A null hypothesis of no difference in dependent variables based on gender of spouse was rejected. Husbands scored substantially higher than their wives on assertive behavior (ASES), and submission (ASC), and lower than their wives on assertion (ASC).

Subjects