An Integrative Behavioral Couple Therapy (IBCT)-Based Conflict Prevention Program: A Pre-Pilot Study with Non-Clinical Couples
Jorge Barraca,
Elvira Nieto and
Thomas Polanski
Additional contact information
Jorge Barraca: Department of Psychology, Universidad Camilo José Cela, Calle Castillo de Alarcón 49, Urbanización Villafranca del Castillo, 28692 Madrid, Spain
Elvira Nieto: Private Practice, Calle Goya 83–3º Derecha, 28001 Madrid, Spain
Thomas Polanski: Private Practice, Mariano Paredes N70-122 and Moisés Luna Andrade, Quito 170303, Ecuador
IJERPH, 2021, vol. 18, issue 19, 1-15
Abstract:
Integrative Behavioral Couple Therapy (IBCT) has demonstrated its efficacy treating severe couple conflict. Nevertheless, its capacity to prevent such conflicts before they appear has not been analyzed. The following empirical study examines the effectiveness of a conflict prevention program based on IBCT’s main therapeutic strategies (empathic joining, unified detachment). A sample of 12 individuals (six couples) from the Community of Madrid completed the DAS (Spanier, 1976; Martín-Lanas et al., 2017), IBCTQ (Barraca et al., 2017), and ASPA-A (Carrasco, 1996) pre-treatment, posttreatment, and at a three-year follow up. Three of these couples were randomly assigned to the experimental group, in which they received five, 120-minute sessions of an IBCT-based conflict prevention program. The three remaining couples were assigned to a control group and received no treatment. Results indicated that the experimental couples grew in their acceptance of differences and significantly improved their level of empathic joining and unified detachment; they also manifested greater satisfaction in their total DAS score. At the three-year follow up, neither group showed significant changes with regard to their posttreatment scores. Although the data are based on a small number of couples and should be replicated, the results suggest that a program based on IBCT strategies can help prevent couple conflict up to three years after its application.
Keywords: couple conflict; couple therapy; Integrative Behavioral Couple Therapy; prevention programs (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:
Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/18/19/9981/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/18/19/9981/ (text/html)
Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jijerp:v:18:y:2021:i:19:p:9981-:d:640984
Access Statistics for this article
IJERPH is currently edited by Ms. Jenna Liu
More articles in IJERPH from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().