The Effect of Olson's Marriage Enrichment Program on the Responsibility and Empathy of Marriage Volunteers

Encouraging people to get married and maintaining a family system is one of the priorities of any society. according to this the present study was conducted with the purpose of Olson's marriage enrichment program on the responsibility and empathy of the marriage volunteers. It was a quasi-experimental study with pretest, posttest and control group design. The statistical population included all marriage volunteers who attended consultation and psychological service centers for pre-marriage consultation in the city of Isfahan in the third quarter of 2019. 30 couples were selected through multi-stage clustered random sampling method and they were randomly accommodated into experimental and control groups (each group of 15 couples). The experimental group received seven sessions of Olson's marriage enrichment program during two months. The applied questionnaires included California personality questionnaire (1987) and empathy questionnaire (Jolif and Farington, 2006). The data from the study were analyzed through ANCOVA method via SPSS23 software. The results showed that Olson's marriage enrichment program is effective on the responsibility and empathy in marriage volunteers (p<0.0001) in a way that it succeeded in responsibility and empathy in marriage volunteers. Therefore, Olson's marriage enrichment program can be employed as an efficient method to improve responsibility and empathy in marriage volunteers through applying concepts such as Active expression and listening skills, conflict resolution training, problem solving training and improving sexuality.