Development of Emotion-Focused Couples Communication Program (EFCCP):A Pilot Study

The urge to belong to someone and maintain a relationship is one of the basic human needs. Marriage is a social institution that responds to this basic human need. But recent times witness an alarmingly rising rate of divorce and separation, making marital relationship a distressing factor rather than one that augments the well-being of the people. The purpose of this study was to develop an intervention program for enhancing couples communication and marital satisfaction and to pilot test its feasibility and usability in the field of marriage therapy for enhancing marriage quality. Development of the program involved integration of qualitative and quantitative research designs. Primary Communication Inventory and Dyadic Adjustment Scale were used to measure the level of communication and marital satisfaction among the couples; interviews and Focused-Group Discussions were carried out to get a better understanding. Basing on these, a nine modular intervention was developed integrating the communication and emotion constructs of Non-Violent Communication (NVC) and Emotion-Focused Therapy (EFT). The program was subjected to expert validation by six inter-disciplinary experts and pilot tested with six couples. The intervention was positively received by the participants and the results of the pilot test showed improvement in the level of communication and marital satisfaction among the couples.