• Stepfamily Education and Financial Practices
  Presented by: Brian Higginbotham, Sarah Tulane, Linda Skogrand

• TOGETHER – A Couples' Program for Managing Financial and Marital Strain
  Presented by: Celia Hayhoe, Mariana Karin Falconier

• Child Welfare Workers' Attitudes and Views Toward Relationship and Marriage Education
  Presented by: David Schramm, Adam Galovan, Ted Futris, Kimberly Allen, Virginia Dick

• What Works in Marriage and Relationship Education? A Comprehensive Review of Lessons Learned with a Focus on Low-Income Couples
  Presented by: Alan J. Hawkins

Abstracts

Stepfamily Education and Financial Practices

Presented by: Brian Higginbotham, Sarah Tulane, Linda Skogrand

This study examined the financial management practices of 62 participants, in Smart Steps stepfamily education courses, one year following their participation. Qualitative interviews revealed 29 participants changed their financial practices as a result of the class, 29 did not change, and 4 were unclear. Common reasons for no change included having functional practices from the beginning of their relationship or financial difficulties remaining despite course participation. Common reasons for change included working together and implementing budget or saving practices. Latino participants were more likely to report change than were European Americans.

TOGETHER – A Couples' Program for Managing Financial and Marital Strain

Presented by: Celia Hayhoe, Mariana Karin Falconier

This paper will present the development and pilot test design of TOGETHER, a program for improving couple's ability to deal with financial and marital strain. The first part of the paper will address what led to the creation of TOGETHER and will describe the program contents and format. The second part of hte paper will describe the design of the pilot test study that is currently being conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of the program.

Child Welfare Workers' Attitudes and Views Toward Relationship and Marriage Education

Presented by: David Schramm, Adam Galovan, Ted Futris, Kimberly Allen, Virginia Dick

Historically, child welfare workers receive preparation in how to work with distressed marital and family relationships; however, focusing on healthy relationship and marriage education (RME) is lacking. In this paper we describe the responses of 620 welfare workers to the need, usefulness, and appropriateness of RME in the child welfare system; we also describe their feelings of adequacy regarding their current training and their current ability in providing RME to their clients.  Results indicate that child welfare professionals are supportive of the idea of RME.  In general, they feel that having knowledge about improving relationships would improve their work.

What Works in Marriage and Relationship Education? A Comprehensive Review of Lessons Learned with a Focus on Low-Income Couples

Presented by: Alan J. Hawkins

This presentation will provide a comprehensive review of what we know currently about the effectiveness of marriage and relationship (MRE) education that is used as a policy tool to help couples form and sustain healthy relationships and marriages. It will have a primary focus on on publicly-funded efforts to make MRE services available to lower-income couples. The review is based on a series of recent meta-analytic studies, as well as a set of implementation studies of large-scale, publicly-funded programs. In addition, recent rigorous, large-scale, randomized control trial studies of MRE programs for lower-income couples will be reviewed.