Dyadic, Skills-Based Primary Prevention for Partner Violence in Perinatal Parents

Couple CARE for Parents is a couple-focused intervention that addresses interpersonal processes within relationships and promotes relationship and parenting skills among couples with a newborn. Couple CARE for Parents uses an approach developed in Australia that was designed to be fairly easy and cost-effective to disseminate widely (i.e., home-visitation and video- and telephone-assisted skills training). It has demonstrated efficacy for significantly enhancing couples' relationship satisfaction in three Australian randomized trials.

Arresting the normal decline of satisfaction of new parents to near-clinical levels is noteworthy because relationship dissatisfaction is one of the strongest predictors of partner physical assault. Managing relationship conflict is critical to the health and well-being of both parents and their children. Given the high prevalence of partner physical and emotional aggression (a precursor to the more serious form labeled "intimate partner violence" [IPV]) in new parents) among perinatal parents, the need for efficacious prevention services is acute.

This randomized, controlled trial will test if couples with a newborn who receive Couple CARE for Parents report significantly less IPV than control couples who do not receive the program. This is a prevention trial. No couple will report ever having experienced IPV. All couples will have three empirically documented risk factors for the development of IPV: youth (each couple will have at least one partner under 30 years of age), parenting a newborn, and psychological aggression in the past year.

The project has the following aims: (1) Determine the outcomes of Couple CARE for Parents. The investigators hypothesize that, among other positive outcomes, couples who receive Couple CARE for Parents, compared with those who do not, will report at follow-up (a) less IPV; and (b) less partner physical and emotional aggression. (2) Identify factors that may contribute to reduction in IPV and in physical and emotional aggression (e.g., communication skills, conflict behaviors, parenting expectations, , quality of adult attachment, partner attributions, child abuse potential, family income, marital status, parenting stress, infant difficultness).

Inclusion Criteria:

• Couples are the unit of inclusion. Thus, individuals must be in a relationship. The following criteria are at the couple level.
• must be living together
• must have at least one member aged 30 years or younger
• must have a baby less than 3 months of age at the time of enrollment
• must have at least one member who, based on self- or partner-report, has been verbally or psychologically aggressive in the previous six months
• have two partners able to complete assessments in English
• have never engaged in intimate partner violence, by both partners' reports

Exclusion Criteria:

• Any of the above not met.
• One member less than 18 years old.