Assessment of Couples

Measurement Questions about Dyadic Relationship Quality

The most widely used and cited measure of intimate relationship quality is the 32-item Dyadic Adjustment Scale (DAS) developed by Graham Spanier to measure the level of adjustment in heterosexual, homosexual, married, or unmarried cohabitating romantic dyads. Many writers have questioned whether a single self-report construct such as marital adjustment can represent the health or status of a relationship. The predominant belief is that global self-report measures reflect the overriding sentiment of the person [Page 118]about the relationship, and this global construct is best termed relationship satisfaction.

Assessment of Couples' Distress as a Syndrome

Although most self-report marital assessment methods yield dimensional scores, investigators have used a range of strategies to dichotomize couples into happy or unhappy categories for purposes of treatment study selection or defining treatment success. These strategies have derived cut-points by comparing clinic versus nonclinic or treatment-seeking versus nontreatment-seeking couples. These strategies have obvious limitations; for example, it is clear that many unhappy spouses in poorly functioning relationships never seek or enter treatment, and certainly a portion of those relationships fail.

In the last two decades, some relationship theorists and therapists have sought formal recognition of diagnoses for types of relationship dysfunction, such as marital discord, in standard psychiatric diagnostic manuals. The empirical work on developing reliable and valid structured interview assessment methods to support this effort has been limited. Existing diagnostic interview assessments are modestly associated with cut-point strategies for dichotomizing successful and unsuccessful relationships.

Use of Assessment Results to Represent Couples' Relationship Functioning

The assessment of couples often occurs at the level of the individual, as in the self-report of relationship satisfaction, but the results from assessing two partners are often integrated in some way to represent the couple system in data analyses or in clinical description. There are various approaches, such as using the mean of the individual partners' scores or an index of the difference in their scores. These approaches have been criticized on the basis that they substantially obscure the contribution of individual partners' scores. The concept of level validity has been introduced to describe the degree to which individual family members' scores can be used to represent the couple (or larger family unit). Level validity can be examined using structural equations modeling in which the contributions of the scores of each type of family member (e.g., husband, wife) to the scores of the unit are estimated simultaneously.

Important Domains as Targets of Couples' Assessment by Self-Report and Related Methods

Both verbal and nonverbal interaction behaviors are recognized as key domains of evaluation. Assessment can focus on discrete behaviors (e.g., problem description, solutions) as well as on patterns that couples exhibit. The Response to Conflict Scale developed by Gary Birchler and colleagues is a 24-item checklist that assesses destructive interaction strategies, including “yelling or screaming,” “swearing” and “criticizing” of both partners. The Conflict Tactics Scale, developed by Murray Straus, focuses primarily on verbal and physical abuse strategies. The Peterson Interaction Record (D. R. Peterson) is a less-structured measure that directs partners to record the context of couples' interaction and the sequence of the interaction; the form also invites differing perceptions of an event. The Communication Patterns Questionnaire developed by Andrew Christensen and Chris Heavey assesses the destructive demand-withdraw pattern that occurs when one partner attempts to engage, influence, or demand change, while the other partner avoids, withdraws, or stonewalls the first partner.

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