Abstract

The purpose of this study was to develop an integrative marital counseling group program for premarital and newly-wed couple and to evaluate the effectiveness of this program. The main components of the program were helping couples accept the spouse as he/she is, develop communication and problem solving skills, understand sex life better and cope with anger. Participants were thirteen premarital and early-wed couples recruited from the community through the church. They attended eight weekly 120-min-sessions of cognitive-behavioral premarital counseling program. Non-participant group consisted of thirteen couples whose demographic characteristics were very similar to participant group. Both group were asked to fill out the questionnaires which included measures of couple satisfaction(the Modified Korean Marital Satisfaction Inventory K-MSI by Kwon & Chae, 1998, the Korean version of DAS by Spanier, 1976), intimacy(the adapted Korean version of Relationship Issue Questionnaire by Christensen & Sullway, 1984), depression(the Korean version of CES-D by Roth & Locke, 1973) before and after the program. Follow-up assessment was performed 6 months after the program was completed. Results indicated that there were no significant differences for the counseling group between pre-counseling and post-counseling assessment. Husbands of non-participant group demonstrated significantly better marital adjustment and intimacy and less dissatisfaction of affective communication and depression just after marriage. Wives of non-participant group showed significantly less dissatisfaction of problem-solving communication. However, these effects were washed out after six months.