Life Skills Training on the Components of Marital Satisfaction in Married Women

Marital satisfaction is among the factors in advancing and finding life goals and a more fundamental pillar of mental health in the family. Marital satisfaction can be considered as a psychological condition, i.e., precarious in the first years of life, and relationships are at a higher risk. Increasing divorce and marital dissatisfaction on the one hand and the request of couples to improve marital relations and increase intimacy, on the other hand, indicate the need for spouses to intervene and expert training concerning marital satisfaction. Improving marital satisfaction by teaching essential life skills is among the strategies that couples can use to manage their feelings, thoughts, and behaviors. Life skills increase couples' adaptation to the environment and its challenges and enable them to correspond with family, work effectively, and social environment issues efficiently. Thus, the present study aimed to determine the effects of life skills training on the components of marital satisfaction in married women.

This was a quasi–experimental study with a pretest–posttest design and a control group design. The statistical population includes married women referring to counseling centers in Marand City, Iran, due to marital problems in 2020. Of them, 30 individuals with lower marital satisfaction on the ENRICH Marital Satisfaction Scale (EMSS; Fowers & Olson, 1993) (conducted by the facilitator) were selected by the convenience sampling method and randomly placed into two groups. The inclusion criteria were having marital problems, including marital dissatisfaction diagnosed through the EMSS; no history of psychotherapy before the intervention; keeping the type and dose of the used drug constant during the research; the age of ≥18–50 years; satisfaction to participate in the research and providing a written informed consent form; absence of psychotic disorders and substance abuse. The experimental group received eight 60–minute weekly life skills training sessions; however, no intervention was performed for the control group. In pretest and posttest, the EMSS was performed. To analyze the obtained data, descriptive statistics, including mean and standard deviation and inferential statistics, including one–way univariate Analysis of Covariance (ANCOVA) was used in SPSS at the significance level of 0.05.

The obtained results suggested that the mean scores of the components of marital satisfaction, including ideal distortion (p=0.022), financial management (p=0.042), family and friends (p=0.004), communication (p=0.034), sexual relationship (p=0.047), religious orientation (p=0.001), conflict resolution (p=0.005), children and parenting (p=0.045), and equalitarian roles (p=0.042) in married women in the experimental group, compared to their counterparts in the control group significantly improved at posttest. However, personality problems (p=0.275) and leisure activities (p=0.178) did not present any significant difference. Furthermore, in the general index of marital satisfaction, a significant difference was observed at posttest between the study groups (p=0.041)

According to the research findings, life skills training effectively affects the marital satisfaction of married women. Therefore, life skills training program can be used as a suitable measure to increase marital satisfaction in couples.