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Chapter Six: Future Directions for Research and Intervention

Public health educators distinguish among three forms of disease prevention (Butler, 1997). Primary prevention involves activities designed to ward off threats to health before they occur (e.g., public service announcements, vaccinations). Secondary prevention involves activities designed to screen for early signs of disease and limit the consequences (e.g., mammograms). Finally, tertiary prevention involves activities designed to treat disease directly and avoid recurrence (e.g., antibiotics, chemotherapy).

Over the past several decades, the history of efforts to promote marriages and families may be understood as moving gradually backward through these three stages. Initially, the sharp rise in divorce rates during the 1970s and early 1980s inspired efforts at tertiary prevention, i.e., efforts to provide therapy to distressed couples and manage the consequences of divorce (Jacobson and Margolin, 1979; Weiss, 1980). As studies began to question the effectiveness of these treatments (Jacobson and Addis, 1993), the emphasis in research and policy shifted toward secondary prevention, i.e., efforts to identify vulnerable newlyweds and provide them with relationship education before their relationships decline (e.g., Bradbury and Fincham, 1990b; Markman et al., 1994). In turning toward adolescence, researchers and policymakers appear to have arrived at last at primary prevention, i.e., developing programs and policies designed to sow the seeds of healthy adult marriages prior to adulthood and reduce subsequent risk of divorce and marital distress (e.g., Barber and Eccles, 2003).

The success of programs that attempt to promote healthy adult marriages by targeting adolescents will depend on (1) whether these programs are addressing behaviors, beliefs, and attitudes that are in fact causally linked to subsequent adult marriages, (2) whether these programs are effective at changing the behaviors and attitudes being addressed, and (3) whether these programs, even if effective in the general population, are equally effective in the specific population of interest, i.e., low-income groups (Greene and Simons-Morton, 1984).

The broad goal of the current report has been to evaluate each of these questions by reviewing existing research and theory on the role of adolescent romantic relationships in adult development and by reviewing relationship education curricula currently being offered to adolescents. The results of this review indicate that none of these issues has yet been settled. Although the available research is consistent with theories that view experiences with romantic relationships in adolescence as central to the development of healthy marriages in adulthood, direct support for causal links between adolescent experiences and adult outcomes does not yet exist. Third-variable explanations (for example, the possibility that genetic or contextual variables shape relationships in adolescence and adulthood without additional causal effects of adolescent experiences on adulthood) have not been ruled out. Although the available relationship education curricula address many of the variables that existing theories suggest are important to adolescent and adult romantic relationships, the effectiveness of these curricula at altering these variables and promoting desired outcomes has yet to be evaluated in controlled studies that employ random assignment to conditions. Although adolescent romantic relationships have begun to receive attention from researchers and curricula developers, data specific to low-income adolescents remain rare.

Recognizing the limitations of the existing empirical base for understanding and intervening in adolescent romantic relationships, this final chapter offers an agenda for building upon existing research and advancing programs to promote the development of healthy adult marriages. The rest of this chapter describes this agenda in three parts. The first section recommends specific priorities for further research to clarify the role of adolescent romantic relationships in adult development. The second section draws upon the research and theory reviewed in this report to offer guidelines and new strategies for current efforts to strengthen the foundation of healthy marriages during adolescence. The final section identifies future directions for interventions addressing adolescent romantic relationships.

Immediate Priorities for Research on Adolescent Romantic Relationships

If programs and curricula targeting adolescent romantic relationships are to be effective, they must be grounded in an accurate understanding of how these relationships function and the role that they play in the development of healthy adult marriages. As Bouchey and Furman (2003) have pointed out, most of what is known about these questions is based on data from white, middle-class adolescents, and even that literature is quite limited. Research that addresses the following immediate priorities would strengthen the empirical base of current programs and substantially advance efforts to promote healthy adult marriages.

Exploit existing data sets. No one studying or intervening in low-income populations denies that the data describing romantic relationships in low-income populations are thin and that what data there are often come from small, ethnographic studies rather than nationally representative data sets. Yet nationally representative data sets (e.g., the Add Health study, the NLSY79, the NLSY97) include data from substantial numbers of well-sampled low-income adolescents. To date, analyses of these data sets have not included many comparisons across levels of income, but comparisons across racial and ethnic groups are common. As noted in Chapter Two, race and ethnicity are poor proxies for level of income, because most members of racial or ethnic minority groups are not low-income (Bachrach, 1998).

Analyses of these and other data sets that address the role of income directly would have relatively low costs and potentially high yield for informing policies that target low-income youth. Such studies would be limited by the assessments already included in these studies, but across the data sets there are enough variables relevant to understanding adolescents and their relationships to offer a much clearer picture of low-income youth than currently exists—in particular, the ways that low-income youth may resemble or differ from more affluent youth. Analyses of existing data sets would provide valuable descriptive data on prevalence of specific relationship behaviors and experiences, as well as providing opportunities to determine if models of relationships among variables generalize across different income groups and different racial and ethnic groups within low-income populations.

It is worth noting that level of income is not the only dimension of relevance that has been overlooked in existing national data sets. It may also be possible to examine the effects of schools and neighborhoods in shaping and constraining adolescents’ access to partners and opportunities (Furstenberg, 2000).

Address diversity directly. Although all low-income adolescents may have common needs that distinguish them from more affluent adolescents, subgroups of low-income adolescents may also have unique needs for which programs and interventions might be tailored. For example, research has rarely addressed ethnically diverse populations of adolescents, and so there has not been much systematic attention to the ways that racial and ethnic diversity combine with level of income to affect adolescent romantic relationships. Yet culture and ethnicity are likely to be important sources of the beliefs and values that all existing programs and interventions are targeting. A priority for new research in this area is to directly examine how adolescents from different cultures may approach their first experiences of romantic relationships differently, and especially how culture and income may interact to shape the impact that experiences during adolescence have on subsequent adult outcomes.

A second source of overlooked diversity in existing research and intervention efforts is diversity in sexual orientation (Diamond et al., 1999; Savin-Williams, 2001). As noted in Chapter Four, there has been little research on the development of healthy relationships for this population, in either adolescence or adulthood. As noted in Chapter Five, existing interventions attempt to be inclusive, but none addresses issues related to sexual orientation directly. As a first step toward promoting healthy relationships for all adolescents, this research gap should be addressed.

Examine the consequences of adolescent romantic relationships for adult outcomes. The fundamental assumption of current efforts to target adolescent romantic relationships—that these experiences can contribute to the success or failure of adult marriages—has never been addressed empirically. Justifying the allocation of marriage promotion resources toward adolescence requires addressing this gap in the literature. There are several ways to do this.

First, as has been noted throughout this report, the Add Health study and a number of high-quality smaller studies (e.g., the Toledo Adolescent Relationships Study, the Minnesota Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children) have followed infants or children throughout adolescence and into the earliest years of adulthood, but these studies have not yet progressed far enough to provide much insight into marriage. These studies deserve continued support because their considerable investments may pay the greatest dividends when the participants in these studies progress through adulthood and the long-term implications of their early experiences begin to emerge.

Second, because most existing studies have sampled narrowly from middle-class populations (the Add Health study being the exception), additional data are needed that describe low-income populations specifically. Samples of convenience, even if drawn from low-income populations, are unlikely to be sufficient. Rather, to inform current efforts, research on adolescent romantic relationships in low-income populations must pay careful attention to obtaining samples representative of low-income groups in general, yet capable of allowing comparisons between subgroups of particular interest (e.g., groups that vary by race and ethnicity or by urban versus rural context). New studies of low-income adolescents must be descriptive, inclusive of a broad range of assessments, and longitudinal (Eccles and Gootman, 2002), in order to capture the course of adolescent romantic relationships during adolescence, examine the long-term implications of these experiences, and identify the specific elements that account for those implications.

Rule out alternative explanations. Establishing direct associations between experiences in romantic relationships during adolescence and marital outcomes during adulthood would be a major advance for research in this area. By itself, however, establishing these associations would not be sufficient to justify intervening in adolescent romantic relationships to promote healthy marriages among adults. Even if they are effective at improving adolescent relationships, programs that target adolescents are only likely to improve adult marriages to the extent that adolescent experiences account for adult outcomes even after controlling for third variables that may give rise to both adolescent experiences and adult outcomes. For example, if socioeconomic status directly shapes adolescent romantic relationships and adult marriages, then adolescent relationships will be associated with adult marriages even if adolescent relationships have no causal influence on adult marriages after the effects of socioeconomic status are controlled.

Future research in this area must acknowledge this threat to causal inference and address it directly when possible. This is not an easy task. Even well-considered longitudinal research can never account for all potential third variables. Lacking the ability to randomly assign adolescents to different kinds of romantic experiences, the best that researchers can do is design studies that allow the largest number of confounding variables to be controlled. The Add Health study, for example, contains data from siblings within the same families. Comparing the relationship experiences of siblings goes a long way toward controlling for family of origin effects. The Add Health study also contains a subset of data from monozygotic and dizygotic twins. Analyses of these data have already examined genetic contributions to adolescent behaviors as diverse as alcohol and tobacco use, aggression, and sex-typed behaviors (Cleveland, 2003; Cleveland, Udry, and Chantala, 2001; Cleveland, Wiebe, and Rowe, 2005). There is every reason to expect genetic contributions to adolescent relationship outcomes as well; analyses of twin data would allow this contribution to be identified and the remaining effects of adolescent relationships on adult outcomes to be evaluated.

Describe how adolescent relationships function. Once evidence has accumulated to support causal links between adolescent experiences in romantic relationships and adult marital outcomes, designing effective interventions requires a clear understanding of the elements of adolescent relationships that account for their long-term impact. Available data on adolescent relationships tend to focus on the external features of those relationships, e.g., timing, duration, number of partners. Far less attention has been directed toward understanding processes within those relationships, e.g., relationship maintenance, conflict resolution, social support (Shulman, 2003). Particularly notable by their absence are data that capture adolescents’ perspectives on what make their relationships worth maintaining, how they go about maintaining them, and how they decide whether to remain in them or leave them.

A deeper understanding of the day-to-day process of adolescent relationships would go far in informing interventions and curricula that connect directly to these processes. Addressing these issues may require methods that have yet to be employed in research on adolescent relationships, such as daily diary assessments or experience sampling approaches. Detailed assessments such as these, which have shown great value in research on adult marriage (e.g., Thompson and Bolger, 1999), may begin to describe how adolescents spend time with their partners, and how time spent with partners affects time spent on other activities, such as school, work, and family life (Furstenberg, 2000). These data in turn may point out how romantic relationships in adolescence affect marital and other outcomes in adulthood.

Strategies for Programs and Curricula Aimed at Adolescent Relationships

Regardless of the fact that the empirical foundation linking adolescent experiences to adult outcomes remains incomplete, it is reasonable to consider adolescents as targets of interventions designed to improve adult outcomes, as adolescence is characterized by transitions that pave the way for adulthood (Magdol et al., 1998). Indeed, the programs reviewed in Chapter Five are currently administering relationship education to adolescents as a means of promoting healthy marriage in adulthood. Although collectively these programs address a wide range of content, Chapter Five notes that existing curricula devote most of their attention to behavior in relationships and thoughts and feelings about relationships.

Expanding the focus of relationship education beyond romantic relationships themselves is warranted for several reasons. First, given the limited research on adolescent romantic relationships, many of these programs are forced to draw upon research conducted on married couples. It is not clear to what extent this research will generalize to adolescents, let alone the low-income adolescents that are the primary focus of current efforts. For example, relationship education programs developed for married couples emphasize skill-building within the marital relationship. Because adolescents may not be in relationships while participating in an education program and are likely to experience multiple relationships before they marry, programs targeting adolescents must aim to develop skills that generalize across relationships. Research on married couples does not offer much guidance about how well skills developed within a particular relationship are maintained in subsequent relationships.

Second, it is not even clear that participating in romantic relationships during adolescence is the best route to healthy adult marriages. For example, as has been noted in this report, early experience with romantic relationships is associated with substance abuse and behavioral problems (e.g., Aro and Taipale, 1987). Other research described in this report observes that students who have the highest levels of academic achievement are also those with the least experience with romantic relationships during adolescence (Halpern et al., 2000). As yet unpublished research by Madsen and Collins (as described in Shellenbarger, 2005) similarly observes that teens with fewer dating relationships during adolescence have a higher likelihood of experiencing healthy relationships in adulthood, compared to those with more dating relationships. Studies such as these serve as reminders that the associations between adolescent experiences in romantic relationships and adult experiences in marriage have not yet been fully described and may be complex.

Acknowledging this evolving empirical base offers two ways to strengthen existing programs targeting adolescent romantic relationships. First, the integrative framework proposed in Chapter Three, by mapping the range of possible content that relationship education curricula may contain, suggests dividing that content into three broad topics, illustrated by different sorts of questions:

1. Antecedent conditions of relationships. Where do our ideas about romantic relationships come from? Why are we attracted to the partners we are attracted to? Why do different people have different sorts of experiences in their relationships? How do family members, peers, and the media affect the way we approach relationships?
   

2. Relationships in adolescence. What is a romantic relationship, and what do we want from it? What makes a relationship satisfying and worthwhile? When is the right time for romantic relationships? What role should sex play in romantic relationships during adolescence? How are romantic relationships affected by the contexts in which they occur?
   

3. Consequences of relationships for adult outcomes. How do choices during adolescence affect development? What behaviors during adolescence predict healthy marriages in adulthood?

By drawing explicit links among all three topics, the integrative framework suggests that understanding each topic requires understanding the other topics also. Thus, programs and curricula targeting adolescents’ relationships may be most effective to the extent that they are wide-ranging and comprehensive, taking each of these topics into account and acknowledging the ways that antecedents, correlates, and consequences of adolescent relationships may fit together. As the analyses in Chapter Five revealed, to date existing programs targeting adolescents have not been comprehensive or systematic in covering the full range of potentially relevant content. The checklist provided in Table 5.3 may prove a useful tool for evaluating the coverage of current and future programs in this area.

Second, beyond suggesting the range of potential content for relationship education curricula, the theories and research reviewed in this report also suggest specific strategies to address each of the three broad topics. Several of those strategies have been described throughout this report. In the rest of this section, to assist program developers, we repeat, add to, and elaborate upon these strategies, noting ways that interventions and programs might design curricula to address the full range of relevant content. The primary contribution here is not the strategies themselves because several existing curricula have described innovative ways of addressing some of these same topics. Rather, the primary contributions are the identification of crucial themes, i.e., the suggestion that a complete program will include content addressing each of these topics, and the fact that the specific strategies described here are explicitly connected to empirical research on adolescents.

Strategies Addressing Antecedent Conditions
Research and theory on the antecedents of adolescent romantic relationships indicate that beliefs, values, and habits developed in relationships with family members and friends are often continued and reinforced within romantic relationships (e.g., Collins and Sroufe, 1999). Relationship education curricula may seek to directly affect some of the sources of adolescents’ thoughts and behaviors in romantic relationships, or, to the extent that some antecedent conditions are impossible for individuals to change (e.g., family history), these curricula might help adolescents recognize the impact that their backgrounds and personal histories have on their current relationships. Specific strategies include the following:

• Relationships education should help adolescents identify and express their models and beliefs about romantic relationships. The data summarized in Chapter Two indicate that, before they enter their first relationships, adolescents have well-developed models of what relationships are like and what they can expect from them. Because these models are likely to shape their choices and behaviors in their relationships, adolescents may benefit from the opportunity to examine their models explicitly. Many adolescents may take for granted that their own expectations for romantic relationships are the same as those of their peers, and they may be surprised to find that this is not always the case. Through free writing or group discussions, adolescents might be encouraged to articulate their assumptions about relationships and compare their assumptions with each other. A benefit of this strategy is that it is appropriate for adolescents at any age, regardless of whether or not they have experienced romantic relationships themselves. Some existing curricula already include activities of this sort, but the current framework suggests that they may be an essential first step in any relationship education program.
  

• Adolescents might be directly encouraged to explore the sources of their models of relationships. Although the studies summarized in Chapter Four reveal substantial continuity between adolescents’ romantic relationships and their relationships with family members and friends, adolescents may not be aware of this continuity themselves. When asked to consider where their ideas about relationships come from, many adolescents may spontaneously look to their families of origin, relationships with peers, their cultural identity, or the media. Those who have already had experiences in romantic relationships may look to those. A facilitator might help adolescents to explore sources of continuity and discontinuity in their own ideas about relationships, and to identify patterns that they wish to continue and relationship habits they may wish to break.
  

• Relationship education should include training in interacting effectively with parents, siblings, and friends. Relationships with family members and peers are more than sources of values and habits. The studies reviewed in Chapter Four indicate that the nature of adolescents’ social network is also associated with the timing of their entry into romantic relationships, as well as risk of substance abuse and behavioral problems (e.g., Pawlby , Mills, and Quinton, 1997). Targeting family and peer relationships directly may be a way of directing adolescents toward more optimal life paths, especially if programs could be targeted to adolescents whose family circumstances are already troubled. Several existing curricula already address communication skills that can be applied across a variety of interpersonal situations. To the extent that skills training in adolescence is effective, and to the extent that those skills could be applied to existing relationships with family members and peers, the potential impact of such programs is great, especially because adolescents are likely to have the same family members in adulthood as they do in adolescence (something that cannot be said about adolescents’ romantic relationship partners).

Strategies Addressing Relationships in Adolescence
As noted above, relationship education curricula devote most of their attention to topics directly related to the conduct of romantic relationships during adolescence, i.e., attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors. As noted in Chapter Five, adolescents are likely to benefit from a greater understanding of these topics and from gaining relevant skills. Yet the current framework also suggests that relationship education should acknowledge how the context external to a romantic relationship (e.g., the stresses that each partner faces, the resources and opportunities available to the couple, the physical environment) may affect how partners behave within the relationship. Examples of both types of strategies include the following:

• Program facilitators can help adolescents understand how their models of relationships affect their behavior in their current and future relationships. The research reported in Chapter Four suggests that ideas and beliefs about relationships may affect the way adolescents interact with their relationship partners. By making these effects explicit, adolescents may have opportunities to change or improve their own behaviors. This need not be tied directly into dry presentations of research findings, nor must it necessarily involve self-disclosure. For example, a facilitator might use a series of vignettes that describe individuals with different styles of attachment (e.g., “Tasha has never felt she could trust her partners completely,” “Sanjay feels he can do pretty well on his own without romantic relationships”) and then ask participants to discuss how those different individuals might respond to common interpersonal scenarios (e.g., “A friend made a date to have lunch with you at noon, but was 30 minutes late”). By examining how general ideas about relationships might affect specific behaviors in these scenarios, adolescents may come to see how their own behavior in specific relationships, and possible continuities between their experiences of relationships in different contexts, might be affected by their own assumptions and beliefs.
  

• Adolescents can be encouraged to explore how their own behaviors affect how other people respond to them, reinforcing their modes of interacting with others (e.g., interactional continuity). The lifespan developmental perspective summarized in Chapter Three highlights interactions with others as an important way that an individual’s personality gets reinforced throughout the lifespan. Adolescents may benefit from the opportunity to attend to these processes and consider whether or not they value the traits and habits that their interactions with others reinforce. This need not involve personal disclosure. For example, adolescents might be encouraged to adopt a persona and then role-play an interaction with someone who does not know the persona that they have adopted. How does the naïve participant interact with someone who has adopted a shy persona? How are the same person’s behaviors different when interacting with an aggressive persona? How do the reactions of the naïve participant reinforce the personas that adolescents have adopted? By examining these questions in a neutral environment, adolescents may gain a clearer understanding of the sources of interactional continuity in their own lives.
  

• Adolescents should be encouraged to appreciate how their own or a partner’s behavior might be changed or constrained in different environments. As discussed in Chapter Four, a common tendency in adolescents and adults is to view other people’s behavior as a reflection of their personalities, overlooking the external forces that can affect what people say and do (Gilbert and Malone, 1995). Indeed, one of the most reliable findings in marital research is that spouses who appreciate the role that situations play in their interactions experience happier, more stable marriages (Bradbury and Fincham, 1990a; Karney and Bradbury, 2000). Adolescence is an appropriate time to begin learning this lesson. For example, adolescents might be asked to consider a couple trying to resolve a disagreement about money. Would it change the nature of their discussion if they were relatively affluent and discussing whether to remodel a room in the house, compared to if they were low-income and discussing how to pay the bills? Would it matter if the conversation took place on a weekday or a weekend? Whether or not young children are around? How would these scenarios play out differently in the context of a marriage versus other relationships? By drawing out the links between what happens inside relationships and what is going on outside of relationships, adolescents may better appreciate, and account for, the external forces that impact their experiences within their own relationships.
  

• To address the environment of adolescent romantic relationships directly, relationship education should be offered in conjunction with or alongside programs aimed at improving adolescents’ lives in other ways. As noted in Chapter Four, negative experiences in romantic relationships are, for some adolescents, part of a constellation of problematic behaviors and circumstances that includes substance abuse and delinquency (e.g., Aro and Taipale, 1987). It therefore may not be possible or warranted to address relationship experiences separately from the broader contexts in which they occur. On the contrary, to the extent that problems with substance abuse or delinquency precede difficulties in romantic relationships, then interventions that directly target the problematic behaviors may improve adolescents’ relationship experiences indirectly, and may provide environments conducive to expressing relationship skills. Any efforts to provide adolescents with greater opportunities for healthy development (e.g., job training or substance abuse prevention programs) may therefore provide a suitable arena for promoting healthy relationships as well.
  

• Curricula that address safe sex and contraception must emphasize that using condoms does not indicate a lack of trust in a partner. One of the troubling findings in Chapter Four is that, at least in some cases, adolescents become less vigilant about using condoms as their romantic relationships grow longer and more committed. To account for this association, some research finds that adolescents believe using condoms expresses a lack of faith in or commitment to their partners. The potential consequences of this belief (i.e., unwanted pregnancy and STDs) are so severe that it deserves to be addressed directly and refuted in relationship education curricula.
  

• Relationship education must address beliefs about intimate partner violence directly. The data reviewed in Chapter Four suggest that violence between dating partners is prevalent among adolescents, especially among adolescents who view aggressive behavior as appropriate. Both the behaviors and the beliefs warrant direct attention. Program leaders should create a neutral environment in which adolescents can express their attitudes and beliefs about violence between intimate partners, but they should also be exposed to data regarding the consequences of violence, in particular the fact that violence between spouses is one of the most powerful predictors of divorce (Rogge and Bradbury, 1999; Rogge et al., 2006).

Strategies Addressing the Consequences of Relationships for Adult Outcomes
Programs aimed at adolescents obviously cannot target adult outcomes directly. However, they can address the consequences of adolescent romantic relationships that are likely to have the greatest effect on adult outcomes, either by encouraging adolescents to consider the possible consequences of their choices and behaviors more carefully or by teaching skills that help adolescents to manage possible negative consequences of their relationships more effectively. Examples of both strategies include the following:

• Relationship education can help adolescents to understand the ways that their behaviors and decisions in adolescence can affect their options in later life (i.e., the implications of cumulative continuity). The lifespan developmental perspective summarized in Chapter Three suggests that experiences in adolescence may have consequences that accumulate over time to shape the options available to individuals during adulthood. To encourage consideration of these processes, adolescents might be guided in thinking about the potential outcomes of their decisions regarding romantic relationships, and about the sequence of consequences that might follow from those outcomes on into adulthood. For example, a group of participants might consider the possible immediate consequences of deciding not to enter into a relationship at all, and then the consequences of different sorts of decisions within relationships. It would be important to include the broadest possible range of potential outcomes in this sort of discussion and to include both positive and negative outcomes, so that all participants might identify with the possible paths being outlined. By drawing out these sequences, adolescents may come to appreciate the range of effects that their decisions about romantic relationships can have on their lives.
  

• Relationship education should emphasize that successful marriages are an achievable goal for adults. The data summarized in Chapter Two suggest that, although almost all adolescents value marriage in the abstract, many believe that successful marriages are out of reach for them personally, and this belief may be especially prevalent among low-income populations. To the extent that lack of hope for a successful marriage affects decision-making among low-income adolescents, they may benefit from exposure to the idea that successful marriages are achievable for everyone. The developers of the PREP program have recently developed a new program addressing these issues aimed at low-income adult women. To the extent that this program is shown to have an effect on the choices and outcomes of its target population, it is worth considering what a translation of this program for low-income adolescents might look like.

• Especially for adolescents known to be at risk, relationship education programs should offer assistance in preventing or managing negative consequences of adolescent relationships. In Chapter Two, the review of research describing adolescents’ experiences in romantic relationships indicated that most adolescents experience a small number of romantic relationships that are relatively intense and relatively long-lasting. With respect to predicting the outcome of adult marriages, adolescent relationships may be most consequential for the minority of adolescents who have severely negative experiences in their relationships, such as pregnancy, sexual or physical violence, or harassment. Such experiences may be disruptive to educational and developmental trajectories, giving rise to adult circumstances that impede the formation and maintenance of healthy marriages. An alternative to offering relationship education for all adolescents would be to identify those who are vulnerable to negative experiences or those who have had negative experiences, and offer support directly to these youths to prevent or minimize the adverse cumulative consequences of negative events in their lives. Programs that combine relationship education with efforts to prevent teen pregnancy, substance abuse, or truancy, for example, should have the cumulative effect of promoting more favorable trajectories into adulthood and thus more favorable circumstances for eventual healthy marriages. To the extent that adolescents who have experienced teen pregnancy, problems with criminal behavior, or substance abuse can be assisted in gaining access to opportunities for recovery and advancement, these adolescents may have a better chance of maintaining healthy marriages in adulthood than they otherwise would have had.

Future Directions for Interventions Targeting Adolescent Relationships

The specific strategies described above are intended as guidelines for program developers seeking to design comprehensive relationship education curricula for adolescents. This final section of the report offers three more general recommendations for improving the focus and effectiveness of relationship education aimed at promoting healthy marriages by targeting adolescents.

Discuss Goals and Objectives of These Programs Explicitly
Although all current programs geared toward adolescents are generally designed to improve their lives, their specific goals and objectives are often left vague. As a result, it is not always clear what these programs are trying to accomplish. Some may prioritize improving romantic relationships during adolescence, others may focus on providing skills that lead to improved romantic relationships during adulthood (even if that means delaying or forgoing romantic relationships in adolescence). Some programs may seek to enhance all romantic relationships that adolescence may experience (including cohabitation and same-sex relationships), whereas others are aimed at promoting and supporting marriage in particular. Policymakers and others interested in services for adolescents as a means of promoting later healthy marriage should consider programs’ stated goals as well as the implicit goals reflected in the programs’ content. Program designers can strengthen their own programs and better inform policy decisions by making their programs’ goals more clear.

Evaluate the Effectiveness of Existing Programs
In an atmosphere of limited resources, those resources should be directed toward programs that have demonstrated their ability to bring about desired changes. As noted in Chapter Five, the gold standard for demonstrating program effectiveness involves randomly assigning participants to receive either the program or a control treatment and then observing the outcomes. An even stronger design would include multiple groups, allowing comparisons among treatments that adopt different approaches. Massive experimental studies are currently under way to evaluate the effectiveness of programs to promote the formation of marriages among new unmarried parents (the Building Strong Families study) and programs to support married parents (the Supporting Healthy Marriages study). Rigorous evaluations of abstinence education programs are also under way. If policymakers remain committed to primary prevention of divorce during adolescence, especially within low-income populations, then a similar effort to evaluate programs targeting adolescent romantic relationships may be warranted.

Coordinate with Other Services Offered to Adolescents
Adolescents are the targets of many and varied programs designed to improve their lives, each of which tends to be developed, distributed, and administered by independent entities. A recurring theme in this chapter is that efforts to provide relationship education may be more effective to the extent that they are coordinated with programs that provide other services and programs to adolescents. By presenting relationship skills as a subset of the broad range of life skills that further adolescents’ development into healthy adults, an integrated approach would offer benefits to program developers and to adolescents. From the perspective of program developers, coordinating with programs offering other skills and services would reduce the risk of duplicating efforts and would allow relationship education programs to capitalize on lessons learned in connecting with adolescents in other domains that have longer histories (e.g., drug abuse and pregnancy prevention). From the perspective of adolescents, presenting relationship education in the context of other programs would recognize and reinforce the idea that their experiences in romantic relationships are embedded in the broader trajectories of their lives. Acknowledging the other challenges that adolescents face may make relationship education itself more effective.

Conclusion

None of the alternative intervention strategies described here are mutually exclusive or incompatible with current relationship education programs and curricula. On the contrary, it seems likely that the programs most effective at promoting healthy adult marriages will be multifaceted, acknowledging that adolescents’ experiences in romantic relationships, and the long-term consequences of those experiences, are woven into the broader fabric of their lives. Relationship education is likely to be one element in a repertoire of approaches. Reviewing the theory and evidence on the links between adolescence and later healthy marriage yields a number of ways that approaches to serving adolescents could be strengthened.

 

 

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