The effectiveness of pre-marriage counseling through the couples care program «CARE» on expectations and communicational beliefs in marriage applicants

As life gets more complicated, marital beliefs and expectations have changed a lot. Therefore, young couples need to receive the necessary training in this area. The Couples Care Program ‘CARE’ was introduced as a premarital education program aimed at improving premarital relationships and marital interactions. The purpose of the present study was to determine the effectiveness of CARE training on new couple’s marital expectations and communication beliefs. This study is a semi-experimental study with a control and experimental groups and has pretest, post-test, and follow-up design. The study population consisted of individuals referring to counseling and psychological services centers in Urmia in the first half of 2018, who were selected from among 60 volunteers who had a definite decision to marry. They randomly divided into two groups of 30 persons (one intervention group by CARE, one control group). For measuring the dependent variables, Marital Expectations Questionnaire (Omidvar, 2009), the communicational Beliefs Questionnaire (Eidelson & Epstein, 1982) were used as research tools. The experimental group received the CARE training program for 6 sessions. After data collection, repeated measure ANOVA was used for analysis. The results showed that CARE pre-marriage counseling has been able to improve marital expectations (f=53.199, p<0.05), and communicational beliefs (f=15.816, p<0.05) among married applicants in Urmia. Based on this, it is suggested that family counselors and psychologists, in pre-marital counseling, use the concepts of CARE “training program in pre-marriage treatment centers and procedures.