| A longitudinal study was used to investigate the efficacy of a marriage mentoring program based on Parrott and Parrott's (2005) program, using scores on the Marital Satisfaction Inventory - Revised. Marriage mentoring is a unique marriage enrichment model that is experiential, individualized, and provides neo-married couples with an intimate personal relationship with a veteran couple.;At the pre-test there were 118 participants from five Christian churches in Washington State. Of these 118 individuals, 59 individuals completed the post-test. The results from the completers indicated that (a) mentee couples did not significantly increase their marital satisfaction over time spent in a marriage mentoring program (pre- versus post-test) compared to a waitlist control group of mentee couples, (b) mentor couples also did not significantly increase their marital satisfaction over time spent in a marriage mentoring program compared to a waitlist control group of mentor couples, and (c) mentor couples marital satisfaction did not significantly increase linearly following the marriage mentor training and again following six-months of mentoring.;The lack of significance in the first hypothesis may be due to Type II error based on the positive trend, large effect size (21%) and small sample size (8). In hypothesis two and three, mentors' marital dissatisfaction scores were already low at pre-test and had little variability. The small effect size for experimental compared to control mentors suggests that the lack of significance may be an accurate finding, but further research needs to be conducted to determine this. The attrition rate for this study was high, with 50% not completing the post-test, and individuals who completed the post-test had significantly lower levels of global dissatisfaction than those who did not complete the final assessment. Results of this study suggested a crucial gap in the marriage mentoring program that may contribute to a problem of perseverance identified through this study. Future studies may benefit from allowing mentor and mentee couples to be naturally matched and should explore methods of fostering the initial mentor-mentee bond. The limitations discovered in implementing the research design of my study may have practical implications for the application of the marriage mentoring intervention. |
