Current and Completed Projects
The Consortium for Family Strengthening Research's current and past projects involve
family strengthening interventions from federally-funded grants, internal seed funding,
or community collaborations.
For example, several members have extensive experience with implementing and studying
relationship education for economically vulnerable and diverse participants. As a
result, data sets include, but are not limited to, the following constructs as they
relate to intimate relationships:
- Relationship satisfaction
- Individual distress symptoms (i.e., anxiety and depression)
- Parenting and co-parenting
- Intimate partner violence
- Emotion regulation
- Workforce development
- Adjustment for parents of children with disabilities
- Implementation science for community effectiveness studies
- Adverse childhood experiences
Projects
Impact Evaluation for Project Harmony
Project Harmony is a federally-funded program that provides relationship education,
family case management, and career skills training to low-income couples and individuals.
We conducted a rigorous impact evaluation of couples who enrolled in Project Harmony
from 2015-2020. Results indicated significant intervention effects on dyadic coping
(i.e., stress communication) at the six-month follow-up. We also conducted a descriptive
evaluation of individuals who enrolled in individual-oriented relationship education.
Results indicated that the majority of participants were satisfied with the program,
and that those who began with greater psychological distress and lower emotional regulation
were more likely to drop out after six months. The reports are linked to the right.
Intentions to Attend
Recruiting and retaining low-income participants in community-based programming is
challenging due to the unique stressors these participants experience daily. In an
effort to advance implementation science, we asked couples who were participating
in an impact evaluation of community-based relationship education about couples’ intentions
to attend their next scheduled visit. Results indicated that their responses predicted
attendance at one-month follow-up, but not at three or six-months. This question was
easy to implement and helped create a practical conversation with couples about future
attendance. This paper is published in Family Process: https://doi.org/10.1111/famp.12662
Individual Oriented Relationship Education
We examined the treatment effects of individual-oriented relationship education on
parenting outcomes. Results indicated that participants who were randomly assigned
to receive the intervention reported statistically significant improvements on parenting-child
relationships three months after enrollment. This paper is published in the Journal of Family Psychology: https://doi.org/10.1037/fam0000852