Effectiveness of group counseling with acceptance and commitment therapy approach on couples’ marital adjustment

Introduction: The family is the bedrock of the child’s physical and psychosocial well-being and is the factor of realization of the physical, psychological and social balance of human beings. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of group counseling based on acceptance and com-mitment approach on couple’s marital adjustment in Kermanshah city.

Methods: This research is a type of experimental research (pre-test-post-test). The statistical popu-lation consisted of all couples in Kermanshah City who referred to counseling centers in 2016. Avail-able sampling method was used to select the sample. Then, referring to these centers, 40 people (20 couples) were selected and randomly divided into two groups: experimental and control. To conduct the research, all subjects before and after the ac-ceptance and commitment therapy for the experi-ment group, answered marital adjustment ques-tionnaires (Spanier, 1976) and questions related to demographic characteristics.

Findings: The mean indices and standard devia-tion in inferiority analysis, analysis of multivariate variance (MANOVA) and analysis of multivariate covariance (MANCOVA) were used to analyze ac-cording to the results of single-variable covariance analysis. There was a signifcant difference be-tween the scores of post-test of marital satisfaction and marital adjustment with pre-test scores. The effect of group on expression of affection is not sta-tistically signifcant (partial n2=0.01, P>0.05, F (1 & 244) = 3.76).

Conclusion: The results of this study indicated that acceptance and commitment approach could in-crease marital adjustment of couples. At the theo-retical level, the results of this research can conrm the results of previous research. At the practical level, the fndings of this study can be used to de-velop educational and therapeutic programs.