Introduction

In the decades since 1960, Americans have chosen to marry later, and more of their marriages have ended in separation or divorce. Although the trend toward later marriage has been fairly uniform by social class, the gap between higher rates of marital instability for economically disadvantaged couples and lower rates for nondisadvantaged couples has widened in recent decades (Martin, 2002, 2006; Raley and Bumpass, 2003). For this reason, and because poor women are much more likely to have births out of wedlock, children born to disadvantaged mothers now typically spend only half of their childhoods in a family with two married parents (Bumpass and Lu, 2000; Cherlin, 2005).1

In response to these trends, when the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program was established in 1996, one of its four goals was to “encourage the formation and maintenance of two-parent families” (U.S. House of Representatives, 2004). Five years later, the federal government took the additional step of launching a Healthy Marriage Initiative. Conducted by the Administration for Children and Families (ACF) within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, with substantial additional TANF funding under the 2005 Deficit Reduction Act, the Healthy Marriage Initiative has provided grants to a range of state, local, and community-based service providers to fund activities aimed at providing couples the skills they need to form and sustain healthy marriages.2 A particular focus of the initiative is marriage education, a voluntary preventive service aimed at providing interested couples with skills and information that may help them to develop and sustain successful marriages and relationships. Marriage education typically consists of a structured curriculum with multiple sessions taught by one or two facilitators. Marriage education falls within a broader class of preventive interventions called “relationship education” and has been adapted for married and unmarried couples, youth, or single adults.

An important component of ACF’s Healthy Marriage Initiative has been a research agenda comprising a variety of research synthesis and evaluation projects, including several random assignment evaluations of the effectiveness of marriage education programs targeted to low-income couples. This chapter provides an overview of one of these evaluations — the Supporting Healthy Marriage (SHM) evaluation — the first large-scale, multisite test of marriage education programs for low-income married couples with children.

Although most existing marriage education curricula focus primarily on bolstering couples’ skills in communication, conflict resolution, emotional connection, and problem-solving, they vary along a number of dimensions, including theoretical underpinnings and approach to behavior change, the topics covered, intensity (length, hours/week), and modes of instruction.3 SHM is testing a relatively intensive and comprehensive form of marriage education designed specifically for low-income families. Its year-long program model packages a series of marriage education workshops with additional family support, including case management, supportive services, and referrals to outside services as needed. The SHM team selected sites based on their experience providing marriage education or working with low-income families; interest in operating this particular program model; capacity to operate the program for several hundred participants; and interest in being part of a random assignment study. Thus, SHM is not a study of a randomly selected group of healthy marriage programs around the country, but rather of a particular approach to marriage education.4

In addition to its relatively intensive program model, SHM is distinguished by its target group — low-income couples who are married and have children. Low-income couples are the focus of the federal Healthy Marriage Initiative because children in low-income families are particularly likely to experience family break-up and because their parents have previously had limited avenues for learning how to strengthen their marriages. Given its focus on married couples with children, SHM’s unique contribution will be to assess whether such services can increase the quality and stability of existing marital relationships and thereby improve the well-being of children and their parents.

As described further in the chapter, the research team5 began the study by conceptualizing the processes that influence relationship quality and stability for low-income couples and developing hypotheses both about how a marriage education program might affect the relationships of low-income couples and, ultimately, about how changes in couples’ relationship quality might affect the well-being of their children. In this and subsequent phases of the study, we have drawn upon current research from a number of social science disciplines and have consulted closely with a wide range of practitioners and social scientists with expertise in research on the determinants of marital trajectories, intervention research about marriage education, and effective practices in working with low-income families.

In the initial stages of the project, the team concentrated on developing the program model and research design and recruiting sites able to run strong programs. Eight sites (with some sites spanning multiple organizations) are operating SHM programs around the country. Following a several-year period of program operations, data collection, and analysis, the project will issue an initial report on impacts on couples after 12 months of follow-up. In this chapter, we provide a broad introduction to the project. We describe first some of the demographic trends and prior research on marriage education that provide the rationale for healthy marriage interventions. Subsequent sections present the project’s conceptual framework and program model. Last, we describe the major research questions investigated in SHM’s implementation and impact analyses, the two major substudies of the project.