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Psychologist James Cordova and his students are studying what makes marriage and other close family relationships healthy and satisfying, and what techniques that people can use to keep those relationships strong. |
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Meet the researchers: What makes a marriage tick
Interview with Professor James Cordova
What drew you to the study of psychology?
When I was an undergraduate at the University of New Mexico I started volunteering with Agora, at that time the oldest student-run crisis center in the country. I was interested in helping people in crisis, and the more time I spent working at Agora, the more interested I got in psychology as a discipline. I switched my major from biology to psychology, entered the honors program and started doing research. The more involved I became, the more I liked it.
So when you continued on to graduate school, did you have an idea of what you wanted to focus on within psychology?
Yes. At Agora I was responsible for collecting statistics about who called for help and why they called. We were able to use that kind of information to design training programs for the staff.
The top reason by far was always interpersonal relationship problems. So when I was looking for doctoral programs, I was looking for professors working in the area of interpersonal relationships. As it turned out the University of Washington had two of the leading experts in the field: Neil Jacobson and John Gottman. There was no better place at the time to get training in couple's behavior.
And that is the focus of your current research. Can you describe that work in more detail?
My research team and I are developing a prevention/intervention program that we're calling the Marriage Checkup. The idea for this came out of some experiences that I had during my internship at Harborview Hospital in Seattle. At that time the hospital was conducting motivational interviewing with people who had been hospitalized because of drug or alcohol related accidents. Motivational interviewing was developed at the University of Mexico and used something called the Drinker's Checkup. For me, this was a teach-able moment to talk to patients about their drinking or drug use, the effects it was having on their lives, and how they might want to move forward in a healthier way.
It occurred to me, as I transferred from the internship into an assistant professorship at the University of Illinois, that there was a population of couples that could benefit from something like this checkup idea. The purpose of a checkup is to reach people before they really need help, in the very early stages of the development of a problem. It's much like a dental or physical checkup. Usually when you go you're fine. But every once in a while, a problem is discovered before it's had a chance to do too much damage, and when it can be corrected fairly easily. I wanted to develop something that was a marital version of the drinker's checkup or a routine physical. And that's the main research program that I'm working on now in the lab.
I understand that, as part of the Marital Checkup, you're using questionnaires that have all ready been developed by psychologists for assessing the state of a relationship. Am I correct that many lay people are unaware of the enormous amount of research about healthy relationships that has been done in the past few decades?
Yes. Serious research into marriage health really began in the late 1960s and early 1970s and has pretty much been going full steam since then. We have several decades under our belt of serious study of the processes involved in marital health and marital deterioration. But much of that information has been confined to professional journals. Every once in a while somebody will write a book that tries to distill some of it, but the venues for getting that information out of the ivory tower and into the hands of people that can actually use it are few and far between.
Part of the purpose of the Marriage Checkup is to serve as a conduit for that information. How can we build bridges between the decades worth of accumulated knowledge on what makes and breaks relationships and the people that could most benefit from it? The Marriage Checkup is a kind of intervention that isn't classic marital therapy. It's more like an informational service. We're trying to expose couples to information gathered over decades of research so that they can use that information in the way they see fit. Knowledge is power.
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So you begin with the assumption that most couples that participate in the Marital Checkup won't need therapy.
Right. Again, much like a physical checkup, most of the feedback we'll give them is that their marriage is fine and healthy. We provide them with information on the strengths in their marriage, and on a couple issues they should probably pay more attention to. We tell them, based on the available research, that if they choose to focus on those issues their marital health would probably improve, and/or they might prevent a decline in marital health.
For a smaller percentage of couples, we will discover that they're starting to enter into some of those processes and levels of distress that, given what we know from the research, tend not to get better by themselves. These couples might want to consider marital therapy. We've got fairly robust marital research about how frequently very distressed couples get better on their own, and over what period of time. We also have robust data that shows what percentage of couples actually improve to the point of marital satisfaction and health following couple's therapy. Couple's therapy isn't a cure for everyone, but the percentages for improvement are better with it than without it. But during the Checkup, we just provide the couple with the information and statistics and let them make their own decision about what they want to do.
The analogy with the physical checkup makes so much sense!
One of the things I like most about this work is that it does have that "oh, of course" feel to it. In fact, when I first started presenting this at professional meetings, the response that I got most frequently was 'why didn't I think of that.'
Do we have to throw up our hands and say that a divorce rate of 50% is the natural state of things? Or can we help people maintain marital health? When I'm dreaming big, my hope is that the Marriage Checkup has the potential to become the norm, and that people can begin to think about marriage in terms of marital health. I think we tend to think that marital satisfaction is something that's 'nice if you can get it.' The general population tends not to see the numbers that reveal how tight the connection is between marital health, mental health, physical health and the health outcomes of children. We want people to understand that marital health is about health in a broader sense and that it's essential to a strong family. If you can take marital health as seriously as you take physical health, then going in for a checkup occasionally, even if it's just to reassure yourself that nothing bad is happening, seems like the sort of thing that could become the norm. I see the Marriage Checkup as having the potential to become as routine as the dental checkup, so that the marital equivalent of healthy teeth, rather than toothlessness, becomes the norm.
Perhaps, eventually, one of the standard benefits of health insurance will include a once a year marital checkup.
Exactly. And some data that suggests that occasionally stepping back and looking with intention at your marriage, assessing what is going well and what could use a little more attention, has a benefit in and of itself. We're not talking about something dramatic or time consuming; rather, it's more about the frequency with which we attend to the state of our relationships.
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Psychology majors at Clark are required to participate in research. Can you talk more about those requirements and research opportunities?
Psychology majors are required to take courses in methodology and statistics classes, and to enroll in a research lab. The labs expose students to the science side of psychology. All the professors have labs that involve undergrads in the work the professor is doing. Lab participation is an opportunity for students to be active in research that's going to be published and to contribute to the knowledge base of the field, all the way from being involved at the conceptual level of designing a study, to collecting data, interviewing participants, entering data, and data analysis. Anywhere along the path there are opportunities for students to be involved, depending on the sort of research that the professor does.
In my lab at any one time, I pretty consistently have a dozen or so undergrads involved in some way. Last year's students were coding marital interactions for a study of couple's emotion skills. This year undergrads are helping graduate students responsible for different parts of the Marriage Checkup study.
In addition to these opportunities, there is an honors program where students get to design and conduct their own research from start to finish and then present it at Academic Spree Day.
I've always very much enjoyed working with undergrads and am lucky that the sort of research I do is interesting to them. Virtually anything that I have for them to do is something they're inherently interested in. It's a fun lab, and we're lucky here at Clark because we get the sorts of undergrads that can help us think. When I'm at the stage of a particular research project when I'm trying to fine-tune the question under study, and how we're going to approach it, it's fun to have these conversations with undergraduates. By the time they get to that level in their education they're really able to contribute to that kind of thinking.
Are there opportunities for undergraduates to go to professional conferences?
Yes. There are lots of national conferences, and we love to see undergrads go to these. It's not as common as we would like it to be because of funding issues.
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I understand you're also a practicing marital counselor.
Yes. I have a small private practice that I maintain on the side. I generally carry a caseload of five to six couples. This kind of involvement helps me keep my hand in the game and stay in touch with what I study. If you lose contact with that intimate connection with couples and the issues they're struggling with, it can become too easy to see just the theory and lose the connection to the real world. For me it's always been easier to do the research if I have my eyes on the phenomenon. That way I can think of examples of what's really happening with couples, and then figure out how to study the issue and do something about it.
Is there a particular obstacle that you tend to encounter with this kind of research?
One obstacle that we encounter both at the level of research and of intervention is that most people are very private about their interpersonal relationships. They are often reluctant to seek help for marital problems, either because they feel like "we should be able to do this on our own" or because they experience an enormous amount of shame in admitting that they need help. It's less common for people to approach problems with physical health with a sense of shame. But there's such a sense of moral failing when people have marital problems.
I think these negative attitudes result from the way we frame the problem. There are processes that are essentially the common cold of marriages. When you catch a cold, most of the time you get over it on your own, but every once in a while you catch something and it gets a little out of control. There should be no shame in getting intervention at that point. But we're still struggling to find a way of thinking about marriage where shame doesn't get in the way. It's a challenge. Part of what we're trying to do with the Marriage Checkup is create a context that's attractive to people who would never go to marital therapy, but who might be interested in learning a bit more about what makes their marriage tick.
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Additional Resources
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Professor James Córdova |
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