Romantic relationship workshops for singles: Are they effective?

Among those participants who complete the WMR workshop, at 6-months post-WMR, individuals who have agreed to participate in our Bonus study will be randomly assigned into one of two groups: to receive a one-time, 2-hour bonus session (bonus) or not to receive it (no bonus). All of these participants will complete a follow-up survey prior to notification of their assigned group. Next, those in the bonus group will participate in the bonus session within 2 weeks of completion of the 5-month post-WMR survey (those in no bonus will receive nothing additional). Data to answer this research question will be collected via surveys distributed to all participants regardless of assigned group at roughly 5-months post-WMR (baseline data) and at 9-months post-WMR (which is about 3-3.5 months after the bonus session).

2022-09-01

2024-10-30

1. Attitudes about relationships and singlehood
2. Relationship decision making and tendencies in intimacy relationships: deciding scale, communication competence scale, attitudes toward intimate partner violence, breakup skills

Individuals will be randomly assigned to treatment (online bonus session) and control (no bonus session) groups after completion of the WMR workshop (only workshop completers are eligible for the RCT). Because the WMR program will occur on a rolling basis across all SMHR partner sites, the local evaluation team will be informed of the conclusion of each WMR workshop series. Exactly 5 months later, all consented participants will be contacted for a 5-month follow-up survey. Upon completion of the 5-month survey, the local evaluation team will randomly assign participants to treatment or comparison group using STATA command sample in a rolling basis. In other words, roughly every two weeks, a new group of individuals will become eligible to take the 5-months survey; after completion of the survey the evaluation team will randomly assign them to treatment (receive a bonus session) or control group. The evaluation team will get a list of completers every two weeks and we will draw a lottery. In other words, this process will repeat approximately every two weeks. In every cycle, half of the participants will be randomly assigned to the bonus session and the other half to the control group. Randomization will be performed at the individual level.

Not available

Randomization done in office by a computer

Individual

No

No clusters

The sample size consists of about 1,000 individuals at 5-months post-WMR. Participants are all single adults, 18 years of age or older.

No clusters

The power analysis calculations below were computed to examine if there is enough statistical power to detect effects if the Bonus program was in fact effective. Power analysis is typically used for impact evaluations and, as such, this power analysis corresponds only to RQ 2. We used the command power in STATA assuming power of 80% and alpha of 5%, and input outcome means and standard deviations using data from the previous SMHR 5-year program (Garneau-Rosner & Herzog, 2015-2020) to compute the minimum detectable effects of a change in means in key measures of relationship decision making, relationship attitudes, parenting outcomes, perceived stress, and personal resilience/optimism. Our calculations show that the minimum detectable effects for these measures range from 0.14 to 0.25 for the majority of the outcome variables. Please notice that Table 2 only includes variables that we collected in a previous program and not all of the variables that we will use in the present studyout of 12 outcome variables . The outcome variables that we will examine in the present study can be found in Appendix D. Consistent with the literature which typically uses a minimum detectable effect size of 0.25, and following Wolf (1986) who reported 0.25 as a strong enough effect to indicate a practical change in non-clinical samples when evaluating educational programs, our final sample size will have sufficient power to detect effects over the full course of the RCT.