PART VI: CONCLUSION

This report takes a first step at laying out the landscape in which future program development and evaluation might occur. On this landscape we find extraordinary variation. We find numerous programs on board and anxious to learn about opportunities for funding to expand their current programming. We find programs scattered among a vast range of settings— from prisons to hospitals to churches. We find interventions that last two hours to those that last multiple days. And we find providers with an interest in several untapped populations that could be potential beneficiaries of these services— from youth to “empty nesters”.

We also observe tensions that providers, organizations, and the field struggle to resolve. Providers try to keep interventions long enough to be effective, but not too long that they discourage clients from attending. Programs need to ensure staff are culturally competent and at the same time have the expertise to deal with more intensive issues, like domestic violence, depression, or substance abuse. And the field grapples with whether and how curricula should be adapted to meet clients’ needs, while at the same time ensuring interventions are implemented consistently enough to be effective.

Based on these findings, we propose a framework through which parties interested in the expansion of marriage programming might view the current landscape and its implications for future initiatives. Our framework proposes combining the expertise of providers currently providing marriage services with that of providers currently serving low-income populations. Both sets of providers bring tremendous strengths to this endeavor, and combining their expertise and capacity to provide services presents rich opportunities to develop new programs and expand current service delivery systems. At the same time, the framework incorporates the unique issues that present challenges to this merger. Understanding different perspectives, building new skills, and accommodating constraints will be essential to a successful merger.

Finally, high quality evaluations of marriage programs will also be vital to informing these efforts. Currently, rigorous evaluation of marriage services in a field setting is rare. And among the research of marriage programming in a laboratory setting, many evaluations still do not create control groups, use pure random assignment, or conduct long-term follow-up with participants. Thus, the research in this field is still not definitive about the long-term effectiveness of marriage programs for couples. If political support is to be garnered for these programs, evidence that they work and in which circumstances and for which populations will be critical. Well-designed and implemented evaluations will be necessary to building this knowledge base.