Alan J. Hawkins

• Ph.D. Human Development and Family Studies 1990
• Professor at Brigham Young University

Much of the research on mindfulness training has focused on individuals and little has evaluated mindfulness training and education in the context of romantic relationships. Mindfulness practiced by committed partners has been linked to greater empathy, perspective taking, and overall marital satisfaction. However, no relationship education program...

Objective The aim of this study is to use in-depth, qualitative interviews and longitudinal analysis to explore fluctuations in divorce ideation over time with 30 participants who had thoughts about divorce in the previous 6 months. Background Scholarship on marital ambivalence and divorce ideation suggests the importance of better understanding t...

The purpose of this study was to identify patterns of parent–child relationships in stepfamilies and explore their impact on emerging adult (EA) outcomes. Six classes of parent–child relationships were identified based on participants’ retrospective reports of warmth and closeness, involved parenting, and communication. After identifying the classe...

Guided by the Stages of Change (SOC) model, we explored relationship-repair behaviors among those thinking about divorce, employing a recent national longitudinal survey of married individuals (N = 745). Person-centered analyses explored whether there were distinct typologies of relationship-repair behaviors. We found four distinct classes: Intense...

Little research has evaluated the associations of mindfulness training on couple romantic and sexual well-being and no research has examined the role of sexual mindfulness within an intervention. We introduced the Sexual Mindfulness Project (SMP) that addressed sexual relationships through daily mindfulness, sexual mindfulness (remaining aware and...

Objective To investigate the effectiveness of fatherhood programs targeting unmarried, low‐income, nonresident fathers. Background Programs for unmarried, nonresident, and low‐income fathers increased in number and scope over the past decade. Programs for fathers have typically targeted five broad areas: positive father involvement, parenting, co‐...

Introduction The purpose of this study was to conduct a meta‐analysis investigating the consistency and strength of relations between prosocial behavior, externalizing behaviors, and internalizing symptoms from preadolescence (i.e., 1–9 years) to late adolescence (i.e., 19–25 years). This study directly addresses inconsistencies and gaps in the ava...

Relationship education is widely used to help people develop and sustain healthy romantic relationships. We first provide a review on the current state of evidence and key issues in the field, laying a foundation for suggesting specific best practices in relationship education. We focus on services provided to couples but also address the burgeonin...

Currently, 10 states have enacted policies to promote premarital education and counseling. However, no research has documented whether these policies have actually decreased divorce rates in implementing states. The purpose of this study is to assess the effects of premarital education promotion policies on divorce rates. First, we conducted an imp...

Program evaluation should be integral to family life education (FLE), but program administrators face common barriers, including expense, lack of evaluation expertise, and fear of no‐effects findings. Thus, the purpose of this article is to provide a primer on feasible best‐practice guidelines for the evaluation of FLE programs. Specifically, we ex...

In this article, we review research on contemporary social trends that influence the next generation's ability to form and sustain a healthy marriage. As a result, we argue for greater attention to premarital interventions for engaged couples to help the next generation address the potential challenges created by these trends. After we briefly revi...

Despite recent policy initiatives and substantial federal funding of individually oriented relationship education programs for youth, there have been no meta-analytic reviews of this growing field. This meta-analytic study draws on 17 control-group studies and 13 one-group/pre-post studies to evaluate the effectiveness of relationship education pro...

This study reports on a nationally representative sample of married individuals ages 25–50 (N = 3,000) surveyed twice (1 year apart) to investigate the phenomenon of divorce ideation, or what people are thinking when they are thinking about divorce. Twenty-eight percent of respondents had thought their marriage was in serious trouble in the past bu...

Objective To explore whether changes in positive interaction skills as a result of participation in couple and relationship education (CRE) are associated with changes in relationship hope. Background Recent CRE work has focused more on its effectiveness for disadvantaged couples, with the early evidence mixed. Increasing the effectiveness of CRE...

Studies examining the effects of exposure to prosocial media on positive outcomes are increasing in number and strength. However, existing meta-analyses use a broad definition of prosocial media that does not recognize the multidimensionality of prosocial behavior. The aim of the current study is to conduct a meta-analysis on the effects of exposur...

The field of couple and relationship education is dominated by a focus on helping committed couples strengthen their relationship. This article reviews several lines of research to argue that the field should give greater priority to youth relationship education—individually oriented relationship literacy education for adolescents and young adults....

Divorce is commonplace in the United States, with an abundant scholarship on the phenomenon. Most research has focused on predictors of divorce, associations between divorce and family member well-being, and interventions and policies for divorcing couples and children. Although this scholarship tells us much about why couples get divorced and the...

This study employed a nationally representative sample of married individuals ages 25–50 (N = 3,000) surveyed twice, 1 year apart, to investigate divorce ideation, or what people are thinking when they are thinking about divorce. Nearly 30% of respondents had thought their marriage was in serious trouble in the past but not recently. Another 25% ha...

The objective was to explore factors in the decision to reconcile after filing for divorce. Participants were asked to discuss how the resources available to them and the meanings they associated with experiencing marital difficulty influenced their decisions to stay married. A qualitative model was used. Seven couples (N = 14) who filed a petition...

The current study examined how parental mediation of media (restrictive mediation, active mediation, and coviewing) influenced child outcomes. Three meta-analyses, 1 for each type of mediation, were conducted on a total of 57 studies. Each analysis assessed the effectiveness of parental mediation on 4 pertinent child outcomes: media use, aggression...

When people are thinking about divorce, ho serious are their thoughts? How often and how long have they been having these thoughts? What marital problems are they facing, and what do they do to address them? This report provides some answers to these questions from a new representative national survey of 3,000 individuals ages 25 to 50 who have bee...

An increase in public funding for marriage and relationship education is boosting the availability of these services for lower-income couples. This study examines whether a 5-year media campaign embedded in the Utah Healthy Marriages Initiative increased awareness of the Initiative and participation in premarital education. A baseline survey of you...

This study examined the association between work–family conflict and couple relationship quality. We conducted a meta-analytic review of 49 samples from 33 papers published between 1986 and 2014. The results indicated that there was a significant negative relationship between work–family conflict and couple relationship quality (r = −.19, k = 49)....

Over the past decade, public funding for Couple and Relationship Education programs has expanded. As program administrators have been able to extend their reach to low-income individuals and couples using this support, it has become apparent that greater numbers of relationally distressed couples are attending classes than previously anticipated. B...

The negative effects of family instability on children and adults have captured the attention of legislators and policymakers wondering if something could be done to help at-risk couples form and sustain healthy relationships and marriages. For a decade now, public funds have supported grants to provide couple and relationship education (CRE) to lo...

The purpose of this research was to analyze participants' perceptions of the impact of premarital and relationship education workshops offered across the state of Texas. Regional marriage coalition leaders conducted online and telephone interview surveys of 1,109 participants between 6 and 24 months after participating in the workshops. Research qu...

Traditional marriage evaluations typically focus on marital satisfaction and communication. However, other indicators of marital quality can be used to assess interactions within relationships. The current paper presents an evaluation of the Marital Virtues Profile (MVP), a brief and easy to understand assessment designed to measure virtues in mari...

This study assesses whether government-supported Healthy Marriage Initiatives (HMIs)—educational programs to help couples form and sustain healthy marriages and relationships—have had a measurable impact on population-level family outcomes. We compiled data on funding for these initiatives between 2000 and 2010 and aggregated these data to the stat...

Comments on the original article by Matthew D. Johnson (see record 2012-08242-001). It is important to challenge some of Johnson's points about the effectiveness and reach of interventions to lower income couples and couples of color and his suggested prioritization of basic over applied research. With emerging findings and practical knowledge gain...

Although many adults and children are resilient after divorce, it is common for marital breakups to precipitate the need for government assistance for families who had been self-sufficient. This study focuses on the economic costs of divorce associated with means-tested welfare programs in Texas, which fall into five central areas: medical assistan...

This meta-analysis examines the efficacy of self-directed marriage and relationship education (MRE) programs on relationship quality and communication skills. Programs combining traditional face-to-face learning with self-directed elements are also examined, and traditional programs' effectiveness is included as a comparison point. Sixteen studies...

This review summarizes and synthesizes what researchers and practitioners have learned about the potential of public policy support for marriage and relationship education (MRE) to help lower income individuals and couples form and sustain healthy marriages and relationships. In short, this review documents modest, early evidence that low-income co...

This study explores the factors that divorcing couples say contributed to the breakdown of their marriage and how those factors are related to thoughts and interest in reconciliation. A sample of 886 individual divorcing parents in Hennepin County, Minnesota, in 2008 responded to a brief survey after mandated parenting classes. The two most common...

This study focused on how couples’ beliefs about marriage and religion shape the meanings they find in their marriage. Interviews about connections between religion and marriage were conducted with 57 Christian, Jewish, and Muslim couples in New England and northern California. Qualitative analyses found the major theme, common across faith traditi...

This study uses meta-analytic methods to explore programmatic moderators or common factors of the effectiveness of marriage and relationship education (MRE) programs. We coded 148 evaluation reports for potential programmatic factors that were associated with stronger intervention effects, although the range of factors we could code was limited by...

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between fathers’ involvement in family leisure and aspects of family functioning from both a father and young adolescent perspective. The sample consisted of fathers and their adolescent child from 647 families throughout the United States. Results from both the father and youth perspective...

In this meta-analytic study, we looked at all empirical studies that examined the effectiveness of court-affiliated divorcing parents education programs (DPEs). Overall, we found that DPEs were generally effective. Nineteen studies with a DPE treatment group and no-treatment control group had an overall significant moderate positive effect (d= .39)...

Using meta-analysis, we reviewed the effectiveness of resident fathering education programs. Our review identified 16 studies with over 200 reported effect sizes. Results revealed a significant overall effect size of d = .26, with specific significant outcomes ranging from d = .14 to d = .61. Studies with father-only reports produced significantly...

Previous studies (J. S. Carroll & W. J. Doherty, 2003) have asserted that premarital education programs have a positive effect on program participants. Using meta-analytic methods of current best practices to look across the entire body of published and unpublished evaluation research on premarital education, we found a more complex pattern of resu...

While a large number of studies have documented how couple education programs can strengthen couple relationships, few studies have tested these programs on lower-income, higher-risk couples. Yet over the past decade, state and federal governments have been experimenting with supporting couple education programs designed to help lower-income couple...

In this manuscript, we provide a sampling of law and policy reforms over the past decade intended to help couples form and sustain healthy marriages and set out the rationale employed to justify these initiatives. Then we turn to the challenging task of evaluating whether these initiatives are likely to bear fruit, acknowledging three primary criti...

This meta-analysis probes into previous research substantiating the positive effects of marriage and relationship education (MRE) on couples' communication skills. We reviewed 97 MRE research reports that yielded 143 distinct evaluation studies. We found modest evidence that MRE functions both as a universal prevention and as a selective or indicat...

In this meta-analytic study, the authors examined the efficacy of marriage and relationship education (MRE) on 2 common outcomes: relationship quality and communication skills. A thorough search produced 86 codable reports that yielded 117 studies and more than 500 effect sizes. The effect sizes for relationship quality for experimental studies ran...

In this article, we report the results of an evaluation study of a program for couples during the transition to parenthood on father involvement in child care. One-hundred-twenty couples were assigned to 1 of the 3 groups: a treatment group that received the Welcome Baby new-parent, home-visiting program focused on infant development and health, su...

This article presents the results of a pilot study of the Marriage Moments program, designed to prevent relationship deterioration during the 1st year of parenthood. The self-guided, low-intensity program emphasizes strengthening marital virtues and partnership during this time of significant personal and family transition. One hundred fifty-five m...

Although scholars have documented many links between marital relationships and parenting, these associations are not commonly explained in terms of behavior that is learned or achieved over time. This paper examines the idea that good fathering—conceptualized here as competent fathering—is the result of a developmental process, and that a loving, c...

This study tests a cross-cultural model of the work-family interface. Using multigroup structural equation modeling with IBM survey responses from 48 countries (N= 25,380), results show that the same work-family interface model that fits the data globally also fits the data in a four-group model composed of culturally related groups of countries, a...

We offer a framework to help marriage educators think more thoroughly, systematically, and creatively about intervention opportunities to strengthen marriage. We draw attention to the educational dimensions of content, intensity, methods, timing, setting, target, and delivery, and their implications for marriage education. Our discussion points out...

Working fathers are underrepresented—conceptually and empirically— in work-family research. Using a global corporate sample of working fathers from 48 countries (N = 7,692), this study compares working fathers to working mothers on key work-family variables as suggested by Voydanoff’s (2002) application of ecological systems theory. It examines the...

Couples making the transition to parenthood experience challenges that can threaten the quality and stability of their relationships and the health of family members. Currently, the educational infrastructure to support the delivery of couple-relationship education during the transition to parenthood is limited. Because new-parent couples interact...

We report research on public opinions about covenant marriage and divorce to inform policy analysts of the social climate in which these legal initiatives are taking place. We collected data via telephone surveys from a sample of 1,324 adults in Louisiana, Arizona, and Minnesota. From these data, we draw four implications for policy: policy efforts...

Couples making the transition to parenthood experience challenges that can threaten the quality and stability of their relationships and the health of family members. Currently, the educational infrastructure to support the delivery of couple-relationship education during the transition to parenthood is limited. Because new-parent couples interact...

This study examines the influence of perceived flexibility in the timing and location of work on work-family balance. Data are from a 1996 International Business Machines (IBM) work and life issues survey in the United States (n= 6,451). Results indicate that perceived job flexibility is related to improved work-family balance after controlling for...

As the study of fathering has matured in recent years, fathering scholars have recognized the need for richer, broader measures of the construct of father involvement (Hawkins & Palkovitz, 1999). In an effort to create a measure sensitive to affective, cognitive, and direct and indirect behavioral components of involvement, 100 items were initially...

Father involvement has been conceptualized and measured primarily as a temporal and directly observable phenomenon. This paper describes the problems associated with this narrow conceptualization and argues for the need to explore broader, more diverse, and inclusive conceptualizations and measures of father involvement. We review nascent, recent s...

Maternal gatekeeping is conceptualized within the framework of the social construction of gender and it defined as having three dimensions: mothers' reluctance to relinquish responsibility over family matters by setting rigid standards, external validation of a mothering identity, and differentiated conceptions of family roles. These three conceptu...

As the World Wide Web continues to expand more families will be using this medium for information on parenting. This study qualitatively analyzed six web sites that did family life education (FLE) with fathers. These sites used instrumental/technical, interpretive, and critical-emancipatory approaches to education. General differences in practice b...

In this paper, the authors propose a “conceptual ethic” of fathering. This framework is presented as an example of a nondeficit perspective of fathering rooted in the proposed ethical obligation for fathers to meet the needs of the next generation. We conceptualize fathering as generative work, rather than as a social role embedded in a changing so...

This study explored the psychometric properties of the Orientation Toward Domestic Labor Questionnaire (ODL-Q) with a sample of 622 dual-earner wives. Adequate internal consistency reliability was obtained for most of the constructs in the ODL-Q. In addition, construct validity for the ODL-Q was provided with multiple regression and discriminant an...

This study explored the psychometric properties of the Orientation Toward Domestic Labor Questionnaire (ODL-Q) with a sample of 622 dual-earner wives. Adequate internal consistency reliability was obtained for most of the constructs in the ODL-Q. In addition, construct validity for the ODL-Q was provided with multiple regression and discriminant an...

The authors extend Erikson's generativity theory and apply generativity scholarship to the therapeutic context with the introduction of 2 concepts: family generativity and generative counseling. The authors are careful to provide a solid philosophical foundation for the practical techniques they hope counselors will begin to employ in working to im...

This article suggests that theory and story can be effectively linked in interpretive family life education programs and illustrates this potential by discussing how personal narrative accounts of fathers’ encounters with their children can be used to understand and encourage good fathering (herein referred to as generative fathering). The article...

Telework is a rapidly emerging reality in the workplace. This study explores the influence of mobile telework on family life as reported by teleworkers in a large national corporation (n = 157). In addition, this group is compared to an equivalent group of office workers (n = 89) from the same corporation. Mobile teleworkers reported much greater w...

As a result of the dramatic increase in women's participation in the work force, more relationship therapists are seeing couples who are dissatisfied with how domestic labor is divided in their homes. Although, this issue may seem therapeutically straightforward, there are many aspects which make its renegotiation surprisingly problematic and compl...

This study was designed to test empirically the value of the distributive justice framework in terms of understanding wives' sense of fairness about the division of family work, as recommended by Thompson. Operationalizations of many of the social-psychological cognitions suggested by the framework are presented. In a sample of 234 dual-earner wive...

Using both traditional scientific and feminist methodologies, this study evaluates the effectiveness of a family life education program designed to help dual-earner couples share domestic labor. Both quantitative and qualitative data suggested that the program produced small increases in husbands' involvement in both housework and child care and la...

Most studies of fathers' participation in child care focus on fairness, or domestic democracy. What is sacrificed by fairness-focused studies of family work is attention to the developmental tasks that adult men and women face while building a life together. This article explores the developmental implications for fathers of their underinvolvement...

The present study examined the impact of the biological father on young children's cognitive and behavioral adjustment. Using data from the 1986 Child Supplement of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, the relationship between father's &resi-dence in the household over the fi rst 3 years of a child's life and children's adjustment was assesse...

This short-term longitudinal study examined stability and change in dualearner husbands' psychological responses to work and family roles, as well as the correlates of these responses. A total of 104 couples, all parents of school-age children, were interviewed on three occasions: (1) during the winter months; (2) six months later, when their child...

Interventions to help dual-earner couples share domestic labor are rare. Related interventions to increase fathers' temporal involvement in child care have met with limited success. This article critiques the few scholarly reports of these interventions. In addition, a model of forces both constraining and driving equitable participation in domesti...

This study addresses the relationship of biological and social fathers to young children's well-being. We outline three general positions in this debate: biological fathers are important to their young children's well-being and are hard to replace; fathers are important, but social fathers can effectively replace biological fathers; fathers are per...

This article uses data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth to examine the coresidence patterns of children and adult males during the first three years of a child's life, with special attention to the children of adolescent mothers. Overall, the most common experience was for the children to have an adult male present over the full perio...

This article argues that the meaning of the economic motive for White married mothers' labor force participation has changed over the past 30 years. The growth in White married mothers' labor force participation has come from mothers whose husbands earn a relatively “adequate” income rather than from mothers whose husbands earn “inadequate” incomes...

While an active father gains rewards from his involvement, he is likely to experience some disappointing consequences, as well. This study finds that fathers of boys decreased in self-esteem across the transition to parenthood. This change in self-esteem is predicted by father involvement with his child, with more involved fathers declining most in...

explore the limits of a perspective of fathering rooted in deficit thinking / document briefly the existence of the deficit paradigm in scholarly and clinical work on fathering / delineate the limits we perceive in thinking about fathers from within the deficit paradigm, or more precisely, from a specific form of the deficit paradigm that we label...

The editors describe generative fathering, placing it in contrast to the role-inadequacy perspective of fatherhood. Contributors then elaborate on generative fathering in terms of gender, ethnicity, and historical perspectives and present research that helps us understand generative fathering in challenging life curcumstances. Applications for the...