Purpose: This study aimed to delineate the couple therapy's effectiveness with the transactional analysis to reduce marital disaffection and advance marital commitment in couples with marital conflicts.
Methodology: The study was quasi-experimental with the pretest-posttest design, and a two-month follow-up test was directed through a control group. The study population contained all couples with marital issues referred to the counseling centers of Mahabad in the second half of 2019 year. To this end, 30 couples were selected by a purposive sampling method and randomly assigned to the experimental and control groups (15 couples). Couples in the experimental group received ten sessions of 2 hours for Transactional analysis per week; nonetheless, the control group did not receive this training. The data were collected using the Marital Disaffection Scale (Kayser, 1993), the Marital Commitment Questionnaire (Adams and Jones, 1997), and Marital Conflict Questionnaire (Sanai, Barati, and Boostanipoor, 1387). Data were analyzed by Chi-squared, Repeated Measures ANOVA and Dunn-Bonferroni post hoc method using SPSS-24 software.
Findings: The findings of Chi-squared indicated that there was no significant difference between the experimental and control groups in terms of age, education, number of children, duration of the marriage, and divorce intention (P >0.05). Correspondingly, there was a significant difference between the experimental and control groups regarding marital disaffection and marital commitment and their related dimensions regarding the pre-test, post-test, and follow-up phase (P <0.05). Moreover, these results were maintained in the follow-up phase after two months (P <0.05).
Conclusion: Based on the obtained results, the couple-therapy teams can exploit the Transactional analysis approach besides other training programs to improve marital issues and conflicts.
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