Strengthening Relationship Education and Marriage Services (STREAMS)

This brief offers lessons for healthy marriage and relationship education (HMRE) program providers seeking to integrate HMRE and economic stability services.

Healthy marriage and relationship education (HMRE) programs aim to support the well-being of families. For such programs to be effective, it is critical that clients attend regularly, yet studies have found that HMRE program providers sometimes struggle to maintain high rates of participation. Identifying and exploring typical participation patterns in HMRE programming can help us better understand this challenge and point to ways in which programs can promote and support regular participation.

This study investigates participation patterns in three HMRE programs that were included in the Strengthening Relationships and Marriage Services (STREAMS) evaluation: (1) MotherWise, which served pregnant and new mothers in Denver, Colorado; (2) Career STREAMS, which served young adults seeking job training and employment services in St. Louis, Missouri; and (3) Empowering Families, which served couples with low incomes raising children together in Fort Worth, Texas. These three programs represent a range of HMRE program services and populations and offer opportunities to develop deeper insights into participation patterns in HMRE programs.

Healthy marriage and relationship education (HMRE) programs aim to support the well-being of families by teaching them skills to improve communication and conflict management, how to recognize the characteristics of healthy romantic relationships, and how to strengthen existing relationships. HMRE programs may pair a relationship skills curriculum with other services, such as individualized job development or instruction on financial planning, that aim to promote economic stability or content on parenting skills.

This brief presents six considerations for practitioners who want to try using text message reminders to increase participation at the first session of a voluntary program and regular attendance thereafter.

This brief discusses possible ways to strengthen the implementation and evaluation of HMRE programs for youth, as it presents several practical considerations to inform future evaluations and increase the chances for programs to show evidence of favorable impacts on their intended outcomes.

This brief highlights six considerations for using social media in research study outreach and tracking in a healthy marriage and relationship education evaluation.

Although research shows adult participants in HMRE programs enjoy participating and find them worthwhile, programs often face challenges recruiting participants and reaching enrollment targets. Programs conducting evaluations that require random assignment and data collection can face additional challenges (for example, increasing recruitment to account for random assignment of some applicants to a comparison group). Recruitment challenges are not unique to HMRE programs...

Healthy marriage and relationship education (HMRE) practitioners need more research and information on HMRE programs for youth. From 2011 to 2015, about half the participants served by HMRE grants from the Office of Family Assistance were under age 18. However, most research on HMRE programming...

Healthy marriage and relationship education (HMRE) practitioners are increasingly interested in integrating relationship education workshops with economic stability services. In its most recent round of federal grant funding for HMRE services, the Office of Family Assistance (OFA) emphasized programs that offer both HMRE and economic stability services such as job and career advancement and financial literacy activities. Grantee staff must decide how to deliver services in each of these areas—either as separate workshops, integrated workshops, or a mix of the two.

This fact sheet provides an overview of the Strengthening Relationship Education and Marriage Services (STREAMS) evaluation.

The evaluation will include detailed process and impact studies of healthy marriage and relationship education programs for youth and adults funded by ACF’s Office of Family Assistance.

Those programs include...

Discover highlights from an evaluation of five HMRE grant recipients, and features video interviews with program staff and participants.

Understanding the relationships of unmarried adult couples is central to understanding contemporary family life in the United States. As a growing share of adults in the United States are postponing or foregoing marriage, marriage rates have declined and the percentage of adults in unmarried and cohabiting relationships has increased. Unmarried relationships can range from fragile on-again, off-again relationships to highly committed relationships that resemble marriage. This report examines survey data collected from a diverse sample of 356 unmarried adults about their breakups with a romantic partner.

In recent years, many healthy marriage and relationship education (HMRE) programs serving couples with low incomes have offered participants economic stability services in addition to traditional HMRE programming focused on relationship skills. To add to the research literature on the effects of this approach, the Strengthening Relationship Education and Marriage Services (STREAMS) evaluation included an impact study of Empowering Families, an HMRE program with integrated economic stability services for couples with low incomes raising children together.

Healthy marriage and relationship education (HMRE) programs provide high school students education on relationships through structured, classroom-based curricula. These programs fill a common gap in what students learn about relationships in school by teaching them about the social and emotional aspects of relationships, such as communicating effectively, managing conflict, and avoiding dating violence.

Healthy marriage and relationship education (HMRE) programs for youth provide youth education on relationships through classroom-based curricula. Commonly used curricula cover topics such as knowing when you are ready for a relationship, understanding the difference between healthy and unhealthy relationships, avoiding teen dating violence, communicating effectively, and managing conflict. Some but not all curricula provide information on decision making about sexual activity and ways to avoid teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections.

This report describes the design of the formative evaluation, as well as the process the study team used for identifying the facilitation training needs and developing the training curriculum for youth focused programs.

This report is the third in a series on the implementation and impacts of MotherWise and it documents the long-term impacts 30 after women (pregnant or parenting) enrolled in the study.

This report describes typical patterns of participation in three programs that were part of the STREAMS evaluation and it identifies distinct patterns of participation in each of these programs and provides profiles of the clients who participate in these distinct ways.

This report is the second in a series on the implementation and impacts of a novel program, Family and Workforce Centers of America, that sought to integrate HMRE into an employment training program for young adults.

This report describes the impacts of text message reminders on couples’ continuing attendance and initial attendance at one particular site's HMRE workshop sessions.

This healthy marriage impact report addresses the following primary research question:

What are the impacts of the Empowering Families program on couples’ relationship status and quality, co-parenting quality, connection to the labor market, labor market success, and family economic well-being?

This report is the second in a series on the implementation and impacts of MotherWise, a healthy marriage and relationship education (HMRE) program delivered to expectant and new mothers.

This report is the second in a series on the implementation and impacts of a healthy marriage and relationship education (HMRE) program delivered to students in two Atlanta-area high schools.

To learn more about a HMRE program that shifted program services to be all virtual during the COVID-19 pandemic, see this report about a site in Florida.

The Strengthening Relationship Education and Marriage Services (STREAMS) evaluation is a random assignment impact study and in-depth process study of five healthy marriage and relationship education (HMRE) grantees funded by the Office of Family Assistance (OFA) within the Administration for Children and Families (ACF). To maximize its contributions to the evidence base and to inform future program and evaluation design, STREAMS is examining the full range of populations...

The Strengthening Relationship Education and Marriage Services (STREAMS) evaluation is a random assignment impact study and in-depth process study of five Healthy Marriage and Relationship Education (HMRE) grantees funded by the Administration for Children and Families’ (ACF), Office of Family Assistance (OFA). To maximize its contributions to the evidence base and to inform future program and evaluation design...

The Strengthening Relationship Education and Marriage Services (STREAMS) evaluation is a random assignment impact study and in-depth process study of five Healthy Marriage and Relationship Education (HMRE) grantees funded by ACF’s Office of Family Assistance (OFA). To maximize its contributions to the evidence base and to inform future program and evaluation design, STREAMS is examining the full range of populations served by HMRE programs, including adult individuals, adult couples...

The Strengthening Relationship Education and Marriage Services (STREAMS) evaluation is a random assignment impact study and in-depth process study of five Healthy Marriage and Relationship Education (HMRE) grantees funded by ACF’s Office of Family Assistance (OFA). To maximize its contributions to the evidence base and to inform future program and evaluation design, STREAMS is...

Since the mid-2000s, the Office of Family Assistance (OFA) in the Administration for Children and Families (ACF), U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) has supported grants to provide healthy marriage...

The federal government has had a long-standing commitment to supporting healthy relationships and stable families. In the mid-1990s, Congress created the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) block grant, which had the formation and maintenance of two-parent families as one of its core purposes. TANF provided...

This webinar provides an overview of the Strengthening Facilitation Skills Curriculum, designed to help facilitators of youth-serving programs improve the quality of their facilitation skills.