The Association Between Marital Therapy Enactments and Couple Communication

• Main Author: Kindall, Paul Floyd
• Format: Others
• Published: DigitalCommons@USU 1998
• Subjects: Social and Behavioral Sciences
• Online Access: https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/etd/2546; https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3552&context=etd

This exploratory study focused on the use of positive, negative, and neutral enactments in couple therapy and the effectiveness of each type of enactment in immediate changes in specific communication behaviors. The sample consisted of 37 videotaped segments of the 10 minutes before and the lO minutes after an enactment. Communication behaviors were coded using the Marital Interaction Coding System-Global (MICS-G). Paired! tests were used to test the differences between pre- and post-enactment scores. Positive enactments (!! = 20) were not related to positive nor negative communication behaviors. There were not enough negative enactments (!! = 2) to test whether they were related to negative or positive communication behaviors. The null hypothesis that neutral enactments (!! = 15) would not affect the positive nor the negative communication behaviors was supported. The lack of statistical significance may be due to the small, homogeneous sample (religion, race, and time married) .