Premarital Counseling And Its Effectiveness Studies

Premarital counseling in modern sense is to improve and reinforce a couple's relationship before marriage by effective interaction so as to produce more satisfying and stable marriage.The prevalence of divorce, the advancement of psychological studies and the rising interest in psychological health constitute three main reasons for the rapid development of premarital counseling in the western countries.This dissertation is to study the methods of premarital status evaluation, counseling program and premarital counseling systematically so as to solve the problems revealed in current premarital counseling studies, which is based on the reality of contemporary social change, the characteristic of marital culture and recent development of premarital counseling studies. This study draws the following conclusions:1. The premarital intimacy questionnaire includes 53 items and three scales: cognitive scale (including two factors of "the cognition of lovers" and "the idealized cognition"), premarital emotional scale (including two factors of "love" and "empathy"), behavioral scale (including three factors of "communication", "conflict resolution" and "the development of relationship").2. The questionnaire has acceptable psychometric indicators:The index of identifying the scale of the project, factorial validity and consistency reliability meets the requirements of psychometric. Three scales have good internal consistency reliability, content validity, structure validity and criterion validity.3. The questionnaire reflects the features of intimate premarital relationship comprehensively with the typical growth tendency, which not only estimates the intimate premarital relationship, but also instructs the practice of premarital counseling.4. The counseling strategies are constructed on the basis of documents review and interviews, with specific theory background, in consistent with Chinese social reality and the tradition of marriage culture which is practical to domestic premarital counseling.5. The focusing group interviews with 61 postgraduates verify the ecological system theory on influencing the quality and stability of marriage, while amending and perfecting the counseling program. The program is appropriate under Chinese value and current request of the times.