A randomized trial of relationship education using Within Our Reach for economically vulnerable couples.

Couples relationship education is grounded in teaching couples' skills and strategies to form and sustain healthy relationships. The purpose of this investigation was to examine the impact of a relationship education intervention on emotion regulation, individual distress, dyadic coping, and relationship adjustment utilizing a randomized control trial for economically vulnerable couples. The analysis sample included 1418 couples (2836 individuals) who were randomly assigned to receive the 12-h Within Our Reach curriculum immediately, or to a wait-list control group. We estimated multilevel growth curve models over time among outcomes between treatment and wait-list control conditions. Treatment group couples demonstrated statistically significant improvements over the 6-month study period on emotional regulation and dyadic coping when compared to their wait-list group counterparts. Although models showed improvements in individual distress and relationship adjustments, these improvements did not amount to statistically significant group differences. Implications and limitations are also noted.

Comparing Visual and Statistical Analysis of Multiple Baseline Design Graphs.

A growing number of statistical analyses are being developed for single-case research. One important factor in evaluating these methods is the extent to which each corresponds to visual analysis. Few studies have compared statistical and visual analysis, and information about more recently developed statistics is scarce. Therefore, our purpose was to evaluate the agreement between visual analysis and four statistical analyses: improvement rate difference (IRD); Tau-U; Hedges, Pustejovsky, Shadish (HPS) effect size; and between-case standardized mean difference (BC-SMD). Results indicate that IRD and BC-SMD had the strongest overall agreement with visual analysis. Although Tau-U had strong agreement with visual analysis on raw values, it had poorer agreement when those values were dichotomized to represent the presence or absence of a functional relation. Overall, visual analysis appeared to be more conservative than statistical analysis, but further research is needed to evaluate the nature of these disagreements.