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Cited by 553

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 104 of the 104 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

Does marriage and relationship education work? A meta-analytic study.

Hawkins, Alan J., Blanchard, Victoria L., Baldwin, Scott A., Fawcett, Elizabeth B.·2008·Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology
DOI 10.1037/a0012584
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Abstract

In this meta-analytic study, the authors examined the efficacy of marriage and relationship education (MRE) on 2 common outcomes: relationship quality and communication skills. A thorough search produced 86 codable reports that yielded 117 studies and more than 500 effect sizes. The effect sizes for relationship quality for experimental studies ranged from d = .30 to .36, while the communication skills effect sizes ranged from d = .43 to .45. Quasi-experimental studies generated smaller effect sizes, but these appeared to be due to pretest group differences. Moderate-dosage programs produced larger effect sizes than did low-dosage programs. For communication skills, published studies had larger effects than those of unpublished studies at follow-up; there were no publication differences for relationship quality. There was no evidence of a gender difference. Unfortunately, a lack of racial/ethnic and economic diversity in the samples prevented reliable conclusions about the effectiveness of MRE for disadvantaged couples, a crucial deficit in the body of research. In addition, intervention outcomes important to policy makers, such as relationship stability and aggression, rarely have been addressed.

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Metadata

Authors
Hawkins, A. J., Blanchard, V. L., Baldwin, S. A., & Fawcett, E. B.
Venue
Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology
Publisher
American Psychological Association (APA)
Published
2008
Volume
76
Issue
5
Pages
723-734
ISSN
  • 0022-006X (ISSN-L)
  • 1939-2117
DOI
10.1037/a0012584
OpenAlex
W2094591448
Cited by
553
References
104
FWCI
29.10
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed

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CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Does marriage and relationship education work? A meta-analytic study. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1037/a0012584
The paper
Hawkins, A. J., Blanchard, V. L., Baldwin, S. A., & Fawcett, E. B. (2008). Does marriage and relationship education work? A meta-analytic study. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0012584

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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.