Washington: A new study has found that watching and discussing movies about relationships can be as effective in lowering divorce rates as other, more intensive early marriage counseling programs.
Discussing five movies about relationships over a month could cut the three-year divorce rate for newlyweds in half, researchers said.
The study, involving 174 couples, is the first long-term investigation to compare different types of early marriage intervention programs.
The findings show that an inexpensive, fun, and relatively simple movie-and-talk approach can be just as effective as other more intensive therapist-led methods-reducing the divorce or separation rate from 24 to 11 percent after three years.
“We thought the movie treatment would help, but not nearly as much as the other programs in which we were teaching all of these state-of-the-art skills,” Ronald Rogge, associate professor of psychology at the University of Rochester and lead author of the study, said.
“The results suggest that husbands and wives have a pretty good sense of what they might be doing right and wrong in their relationships . Thus, you might not need to teach them a whole lot of skills to cut the divorce rate. You might just need to get them to think about how they are currently behaving. And for five movies to give us a benefit over three years-that is awesome,” he added.
The study is published in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology.
