William Doherty

• University of Minnesota

We examined the prevalence of relationship undermining statements by therapists treating couples, as reported by clients, and the association of these statements with outcomes. Participants (n = 270) reported on recollections of their therapist saying that they were incompatible, that therapist could not help them, that the relationship was beyond...

Introduction: Studies in the United States have shown associations between family/shared meal frequency and child health and well-being. Less is known about family/shared meal characteristics (e.g., frequency, meal type, meal activities) in adults and international samples and whether there are protective associations between family/shared meal fre...

Een vaak aangehaalde, maar slecht onderbouwde opvatting over relatietherapie is dat koppels gemiddeld zes jaar wachten voordat zij met relatietherapie beginnen voor ernstige relatieproblemen. Deze opvatting gaat vaak hand in hand met het idee dat veel koppels “te laat” komen en dat de vooruitzichten op herstel niet goed zijn. Dit is de eerste studi...

Introduction A critical component to addressing climate change is effective communication with the public and legislators about urgency for action. Health professionals have a vital role to play in climate advocacy. However, several key barriers to public advocacy have been identified, including limited communication skills to effectively advocate...

This study examined the prevalence of relationship undermining statements by psychotherapists as reported by clients in individual therapy who presented with relationship problems, and whether these statements were associated with worse outcomes for client relationships. Participants (n = 101) reported on recollections of whether their therapist ha...

We present two related studies on confiding about relationships among African Americans. Study one examined how African Americans serve as confidants in their social networks for people having couple relationship concerns. Using a national survey of African American adults, this study documented the prevalence of confiding relationships, the kinds...

A widely cited but poorly supported idea in the couples therapy field is that the average couple waits six years before starting therapy for serious relationship problems. This figure is often accompanied by the notion that many couples come "too late" and have poor prospects for recovery. This is the first large-sample study on the delay between t...

This chapter describes how social and cultural forces have influenced the development of the field of systemic family therapy from its origins to contemporary times, and how the field, in turn, has influenced the larger culture. The assumption behind this analysis is that new professional fields arise to meet needs in a particular historical contex...

This chapter makes a case for the importance of public policy for couple therapy and other relational therapies and calls for us to use systemic skills to make unique contributions to society, government, and culture. It describes how state and federal policies, which were developed in response to broad social changes, came to regulate the professi...

This chapter describes how social and cultural forces have influenced the development of the field of systemic family therapy from its origins to contemporary times, and how the field, in turn, has influenced the larger culture. The assumption behind this analysis is that new professional fields arise to meet needs in a particular historical contex...

This chapter makes a case for the importance of public policy for couple therapy and other relational therapies and calls for us to use systemic skills to make unique contributions to society, government, and culture. It describes how state and federal policies, which were developed in response to broad social changes, came to regulate the professi...

This study examined divorce attitudes and reasons for divorce in Iran, a nation experiencing a rapid increase in divorce. Using instruments translated into Farsi with a sample of 230 Iranian spouses filing for divorce, we found a preponderance of common relational reasons for divorce (such as growing apart and not getting enough attention), along w...

My story begins with the idealism of humanistic and family systems therapies of the 1970s, followed by disillusionment with making a difference in the larger world, and then the discovery of citizen therapist work. I describe my initial forays into direct community action and then two current projects on major social problems: police relationships...

This study is the first to examine confiding about problems in marital and long-term committed relationships among lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) individuals. Areas explored included the prevalence of confiding relationships, the kinds of problems brought to confidant, and degree of stress confidants experience in this role. Prevale...

“Community engagement” has been defined in a variety of ways over the years, ranging from petition and protests by disenfranchised groups against powerful others (e.g., businesses, governments) who have hurt or neglected them to purposeful partnerships advanced by lay community members and professional organizations. In healthcare, we have seen com...

This study is the first to examine confiding about problems in marital and long-term committed relationships among gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender (GLBT) individuals. Areas explored include the prevalence of confiding relationships, the kinds of problems brought to confidant, and types of stress confidants experience in this role. Prevalenc...

This article introduces a typology of attitudes toward proceeding with a divorce among parents of minor children. The backdrop is recent research showing that some parents are ambivalent about the divorce and are open to reconciliation services. Surveying a sample of 624 parents who had filed for divorce, the study found that about two thirds of pa...

Background: To date there has been limited success with childhood obesity prevention interventions. This may be due in part, to the challenge of reaching and engaging parents in interventions. The current study used a community-based participatory research (CBPR) approach to engage parents in cocreating and pilot testing a childhood obesity prevent...

There is considerable academic and popular concern about the increasing gender gap in higher education enrollment in the United States. Males now constitute just 43% of the postsecondary enrollment. This research focused on nonmarital birth and father absence as predictors of lower levels of college enrollment for boys versus girls. The authors pre...

This study examined confiding patterns in a national sample of 1000 U.S. adults aged 25-70 to inform the development of an educational program for confidants, called Marital First Responders. Results showed that 73% of U.S. adults have been a confidant to someone with a problem in a marriage or long-term committed relationship. The most common conf...

This article describes discernment counseling, an approach to working with couples where one partner is leaning toward divorce and the other wants to preserve the relationship and work on it in couples therapy. These "mixed-agenda" couples are common in clinical practice but have been neglected in the literature. The goal of discernment counseling...

Comments on the article "Don Bloch's vision for Collaborative Family Health Care: Progress and next steps" by C. J. Peek (see record 2015-25290-002). Every visionary deserves a skilled integrator and synthesizer such as C. J. Peek. Don would have been impressed with this concise account of the evolution of his own ideas and those of his colleagues...

Medical family therapy is a form of professional practice that uses a biopsychosocial approach and systemic family therapy principles in the collaborative treatment of individuals and families dealing with medical problems. It emerged out of the experience of family therapists working in primary medical care settings in the 1980s and 1990s. This ar...

Comments on the article "Joint principles: Integrating behavioral health care into the patient-centered medical home" (see record 2014-24217-011). The American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy (AAMFT) represents a mental health profession with a long track record in integrated primary care, particularly with family medicine. The authors...

The call for interdisciplinary collaboration in health care is longstanding, and our collective efforts to engage in it are evolving across training programs and healthcare facilities today more than they ever have. Contemporary and cuttingedge advancements in the Patient-Centered Medical Home (PCMH) movement are arguably pushing team-based approac...

Couple relationship education (CRE) has been proposed as one means to help fragile families stabilize their relationships. The current research is one of the first studies to look at the outcomes of a CRE program with fragile families in the areas of couple stability and marriage formation. Data were from the Family Formation Project, a federal and...

The call for interdisciplinary collaboration in health care is longstanding, and our collective efforts to answer this across mental health and biomedical care and training sites are evolving faster today than ever before. As we do this, it is important to recognize the lived experience, wisdom, and energy of the patients, families, and communities...

The authors have devised their strategy «family therapy in medicine» to cater specifically to the sector of chronic physical illnesses. The model sets out to overcome the following dissociations: 1. the separation between mind and body, 2. the division between individual and family, 3. the division between individual, family, and institutional medi...

Although there is a well-established literature showing a positive association between the frequency of family meals and child and adolescent healthful dietary intake and lower body mass index (BMI), little is known about the association between family meal frequency (quantity) and adult health outcomes and whether quality (distractions) of family...

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...

To explore multiple family members' perceptions of risk and protective factors for healthful eating and physical activity in the home. Ten multifamily focus groups were conducted with 26 families. Community setting with primarily black and white families. Family members (n = 103) were aged 8 to 61 years. Risk and protective factors for healthful ea...

This study offers the first research data on the interest of divorcing parents in marital reconciliation. A sample of 2,484 divorcing parents was surveyed after taking required parenting classes. They were asked about whether they believed their marriage could still be saved with hard work, and about their interest in reconciliation services. About...

Concerns have been raised that relationship education with couples who have experienced intimate partner violence (IPV) may set off further violence as the couple works through relationship issues. This is one of the first empirical research studies to address whether couples who have experienced IPV prior to enrollment have an elevated risk of vio...

Among the challenges facing single mothers, a particularly difficult one is how to help children develop “male-positive” attitudes in situations when the parents have broken up and children have no active relationship with the father. Despite a large academic literature on single mothering, there is strikingly little discussion on this topic. Using...

Most contemporary studies of change in marital quality over time have used growth curve modeling to describe continuously declining mean curves. However, there is some evidence that different trajectories of marital quality exist for different subpopulations. Group-based trajectory modeling provides the opportunity to conduct an empirical investiga...

This article describes and updates the work of the Families and Democracy and Citizen Health Care Project, which engages with community concerns in order to effect change on many system levels. The project draws on family therapy's tradition of interest in larger social issues and adds democratic public theory and community organizing strategies. S...

Community-based participatory research (CBPR) is an action research approach that emphasizes collaborative partnerships between community members, community organizations, health care providers, and researchers to generate knowledge and solve local problems. Although relatively new to the field of family social science, family and health researcher...

We introduce Community Engaged Parent Education as a model for civic engagement in parent education. In Community Engaged Parent Education, the parent educator weaves the public dimensions of parenting into the everyday practice of group parent education. It is not a curriculum but a community-collaborative way of teaching all parenting topics by c...

As the world of collaborative family healthcare evolves in synchrony with advancements in medicine and medical technologies, new and emerging clinical and psychotherapeutic approaches, and macrosystemic changes in care delivery and management systems, we are continuously challenged to step outside the comfort zones of our baseline training and comp...

Diabetes is a growing problem that threatens both individual health and health care systems throughout the industrialized world. This study analyzes the process and evolution of a collaborative project dealing with diabetes and employing action research methodology and the Citizen Health Care model. Partners in Diabetes (PID) was created through a...

This paper offers a model for conceptualizing interactional patterns in families presenting for treatment of obesity, and suggests a method for organizing assessment and for prioritizing treatment strategies. We use the Family FIRO Model as a framework to organize complex assessment issues, to assign priorities for which issues should be treated fi...

Noting that Parent Effectiveness Training (P.E.T.) has achieved a measure of uncritical acceptance among professionals and laypersons, the authors express reservations about the program. In particular, RE. T. is criticized for its emphasis on one-sided techniques in the parent-child relationship as well as its tendency to reduce complex problems to...

This study examined interview and essay data for 50 married couples who had the most positive or most negative reactions in a larger sample of participants in Marriage Encounter weekends. We were interested in describing the experiences of couples who years later believed they were strongly helped by the program or who believed their marriages dete...

This paper describes and evaluates the Marriage Encounter movement from theoretical and clinical perspectives. While acknowledging that Marriage Encounter responds to a need among many couples for greater marital closeness, the authors raise concerns about potentially destructive and illusory effects of the Marriage Encounter experience. The paper...

This paper argues that family therapy is failing to attend to the contexts in which family mental health services are provided and, therefore, is losing touch with the realities of family services in communities. We present a model for describing the institutional contexts of family mental health treatment in North America, and explore how these co...

This paper analyzes 13 models of family therapy according to their special emphases on the Family FIRO model's dimensions of inclusion, control and intimacy. We first examined chapters on each model in Gurman and Kniskern's Handbook of Family Therapy; we then sent our preliminary ratings to the authors of the chapters for comment. The final concept...

This retrospective survey was conducted to determine how couples felt about their Marriage Encounter experience an average of four years later. One hundred twenty-nine couples were randomly selected from those who attended a National Marriage Encounter weekend in Eastern Iowa over a ten-year period. The results indicated that about 80% of the coupl...

Citizen health care is a way to engage patients, families, and communities as coproducers of health and health care. It goes beyond the activated patient to the activated community, with professionals acquiring community organizing skills for working with individuals and families who see themselves as citizens of health care--builders of health in...

This study examined whether a group educational intervention during the transition to parenthood can enhance the quality of father-child interaction and increase father involvement with their children. A randomized experimental design was used to evaluate an 8-session program with 165 couples who were first-time parents, beginning during the second...

We describe a democratic citizen model of community organizing for mobilizing and partnering with families, using the overscheduling of children as a case example. We provide an overview of the growing body of research on this aspect of family time, describe the difference between a citizen model and program models for working with families, give t...

A national sample of marriage and family therapists (MFTs) was used to describe practice patterns of MFTs whose clients use psychotropics and to compare medicated and nonmedicated clients. Marriage and Family Therapists (n=283) reported on 195 medicated and 483 nonmedicated adult clients. Clients (n=375) rated their improvement and satisfaction wit...

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...

This article reviews the development of community marriage initiatives and their relationship with family professionals, with particular emphasis on sociohistorical context. We describe five leading community marriage initiatives, discuss the state of the evaluation research, and propose new directions for this promising area of work.