JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

In-person relationship education classes funded by the federal government tend to experience relatively high attrition rates and have only limited effects on relationships. In contrast, low-income couples tend to report meaningful gains from online relationship education when provided with individualized coach contact. However, little is known about the method and intensity of practitioner contact that a couple requires to complete the online program and receive the intended benefit.

Objective:

The current protocol seeks to: a) use the within-group models to create an algorithm to assign future couples to different programs and level of coach contact, b) identify the most powerful predictors of treatment adherence and gains in relationship satisfaction within three different levels of coaching, and c) examine the most powerful predictors of treatment adherence and gains in relationship satisfaction between three levels of coach contact.

Methods:

To accomplish these goals, this project intends to use data from an online Sequential Multiple Assignment Randomized Trial of the OurRelationship and ePREP programs where the method and type of coach contact were randomly varied across 1,248 couples (2,496 individuals) with the hope of advancing theory in this area and generating accurate predictions.

Results:

The current protocol was funded by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children and Families, Grant Number 90PD0309.

Conclusions:

Some of the direct benefits from this protocol include benefits to social services programs administrators, tailoring of more effective relationship education, and the effective delivery of evidence- and web-based relationship health interventions. Clinical Trial: The current protocol was pre-registered with ClinicalTrials.gov (NCT02806635).