12 - On Intervention and Relationship Events: A Marital Therapist Looks at Longitudinal Research on Marriage

Summary

Most, if not all, investigators of marriage assume that their work may have implications for clinical practice. Some may even use these implications as part of the justification for their work. I approach this commentary initially from the perspective of a clinician asking about these implications. What can the clinician learn from longitudinal research on marriage? How might longitudinal research have greater applicability to the clinician?

Although my initial comments focus on the clinical implications of the findings here, I would argue that basic research does not need to have applied implications in order to be justifiable or important. Greater knowledge about marriage is important for its own sake. Furthermore, this greater knowledge will ultimately, even if it does not immediately, assist our efforts to promote human well-being in marriage. Too great an effort to make research relevant to clinical practice may even bias research. For example, Bradbury, Cohan, and Karney (this volume) argue that a desire to be clinically relevant made researchers ignore predictors of marital discord that are relatively unchangeable. So my conclusions about the clinical implications of the present research may not necessarily address the overall importance of the research to a science of marriage or, more broadly, to a science of close relationships.